B. C. Southam

A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot

Copyright © 1994, 1968 by Brian Southam

A Harvest original
Harcourt Brace & Company
525 B Street, San Diego, CA 92101
15 East 26th Street, New York, NY 10010



The blurb on the back of the book:

"The more we know of Eliot, the better," said Ezra Pound. And we have indeed learned much about T. S. Eliot since the first publication of B. C. Southam's A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot a quarter century ago. The long-lost manuscripts of The Waste Land and some of Selected Poems were discovered in 1968, and the first volume of Eliot's collected letters were published in 1988. This sixth edition of Southam's guide has been substantially revised and expanded to keep abrest of the new material that has come to light and the wealth of scholarship that has followed.

"People are rightly suspicious of notes", Southam says. "and this book is made up of little else. But my one aim has been to help the reader towards his own understanding of Eliot's poetry. Basically, this Guide is an aid, to be used like any work of reference, to be consulted and then put aside." Systematically and straightforwardly, Southam identifies the wide and often baffling quotations, allusions, and historical references that appear in the work of the man who has been called "the greatest inventive genius of twentieth-century poetry."

"Intelligently done . . . very useful . . . undeniably handy."
        -- Times Literary Supplement (London)

B. C. Southam has written widely on T. S. Eliot, jane Austen, and Lord Tennyson. Formerly an instructor at Oxford and London Universities, he is publisher of the Athlone Press in London.


Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Southam, B. C.
[Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot]
A Guide to the Selected Poems of T. S. Eliot / B. C. Southam -- 6th ed.
p.     cm.
Originally published: London: Faber and Faber, 1994.
"A Harvest original."
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-15-600261-2
1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888 - 1965 --
Criticism and interpretation -- Handbooks, manuals, etc,
I. Title.
PS3509.L43Z869     1996
821'.912 -- dc20     96-4007


Printed in the Unitied States of America First U.S. edition 1996
A C E F D B



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