
-Lee Oser, author of T.S. Eliot and American Poetry and The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Becket.
Dr Webster’s introduction offers compelling reasons for experienced readers to revisit Eliot, and powerful incentives for new readers to explore the landscape of this immeasurably influential artist.
-Dr. E Victor Bobb, Whitworth University
. . . Eliot's poetry deserves a new readership. As the United States continues to seek departed nymphs through the incantations of technology, as moral impotence becomes the norm, the jeremiad voice of The Waste Land is a much needed corrective; its pessimism may in fact be the best prescription for our time. Eliot's critique of Victorian decay, of the bankruptcy of empire, "Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal," is a necessary rejoinder for a generation still trying to maintain a Post-WWII “American Dream.” As prosperity becomes increasingly mirage-like in the Twenty First Century, as decadence begets debt, as shalom is pursued through duplicitous governance and predator drones, the poem's final lamentation, "Shantih, Shantih, Shantih," is an apt benediction for our age. To survey this "heap of broken images" as Eliot so courageously does, is to recognize that all is not well, that unless there is revelation, "the sound of water over a rock," unless we are able to answer, "Who is the third who walks always beside you?," there is little reason for hope.
-From the Introduction by Jeremiah Webster
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