In Defence of T.S. Eliot

By Craig Raine
Picador / Macmillan
July 2000
ISBN: 0-330-48545-8
526 p.
$22.95 paper original

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Samuel Johnson' testicles, Gerard Manley Hopkins' eyeballs, Holden Caulfield's wound, fellatio in Tess of the D'Ubervilles, the Bible as literature, the untranslatability of swear-words, Emily Dickinson's walk on the wild side, salted apples, alleged anti-Semitism and its opposite in T.S. Elliot, the old lady in Moscow's Lubyanka prison, Chekhov's repetitions, Beckett's punitive anti-theatre, Kipling's democratic imagination, Robert Frost as a modernist poet - In Defence of T.S. Elliot is notable for its extraordinary range. "Raine pounces on writers lacking his own high degree of linguistic resolution and independence. The citizenly impulse behind these arresting critical interventions is usually commendable. One gets the impression of a man simmering in long silence, coming reluctantly to the boil because someone has to speak up." -Geoff Dyer, Guardian

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