T. S. Eliot's Use of Popular Sources

This unconventional study of T. S. Eliot is based on the conviction that Eliot is not just a "difficult" poet who wrote for intellectual readers, but also a writer for the common man. This volume focuses on three popular sources: nonsense poetry of the sort written by Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, detective fiction and the music-hall/vaudeville tradition. The study makes use of unpublished material from rare book libraries (including the New York Public Library, the Houghton at Harvard, the Beinecke at Yale, and the Harry Ramson Center at Austin). The theoretical premises are derived from critics like Roman Jakobson and Mikhail Bakhtin.