T.S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect

G. Douglas Atkins is a Professor of English at the University of Kansas, USA. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books, including Reading T.S. Eliot: 'Four Quartets' and the Journey Towards Understanding; T.S. Eliot and the Essay; On the Familiar Essay; Challenging Academic Orthodoxies; Literary Paths to Religious Understanding: Essays on Dryden, Pope, Keats, George Eliot, Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and E.B. White; and Swift's Satires on Modernism. He is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including NEH, the Mellon Foundation, and American Council of Learned Societies; has received several awards for teaching; and was the winner of the Kenyon Review's prize for literary excellence in nonfiction prose.

"Riddled with such dense and literary food for thought in its entirety, T. S. Eliot and the Failure to Connect is an exceptional book in that it really does hone in on the subject matter of its title. I've read a number of books on literary criticism that pertain to do the same, yet do everything BUT. To be sure, having reached the end of the book, I almost felt compelled to start reading it all over again; and there really aren't that many books within the genre I can say that about. Indeed, if you like T. S. Eliot, or are in anyway (still) perplexed with regards the complex, albeit sublime The Waste Land, then this book comes highly, highly recommended." - David Marx

• 1. The Vanity of Human Wishes 2. Two and two, necessarye coniunction:Towards 'Amalgamating Disparate Experience' 3. He Do the Police in Different Voices: Eyes, You, and I in 'The Hollow Men' 4. 'The End of All Our Exploring': The Gift Half Understood in Four Quartets 5. Voices Hollow and Plaintive, Unattended and Peregrine: Hints and Guesses in The Waste Land 6. Tradition as (Disembodied) Voice: 'The word within the word' in 'Gerontion' 7. From Hints and Guesses: Eliot 'B.C.' and After Conversion