Author Description

The postwar years of this volume represent one of the richest and most rewarding periods of Eliot's career. Following receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, he was in constant demand to lecture, broadcast, contribute to periodicals, and receive honorary degrees and recognition from numerous European, American, and British universities and societies. These activities produced a great variety of unpublished, uncollected, and unrecorded addresses, speeches, and tributes, together with ten major literary essays that have become part of Eliot's permanent canon, from "Milton II" to "The Three Voices of Poetry." A film version of Murder in the Cathedral and the publication and production of two new plays, The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk, generated new essays on the relation of poetry, drama, and the theater, leading to the canonical "Poetry and Drama." Of central concern in the volume is the relation of religion, education, and culture, and the responsibility of the man of letters for reconstructing that relation after the devastations of war, a concern developed in Notes towards the Definition of Culture and expanded in the previously unpublished "Die Idee einer europäischen Gesellschaft" [The Idea of a European Society].