T.S. Eliot's Silent Voices

This is the first comprehensive, in-depth study of Eliot's unpublished verse. Through a close reading of the poems themselves, Mayer offers a new look at the familiar works by approaching them as a Modernist poetry of consciousness, expressed in a new poetic form as the psychic monologue. Uncovering new themes discovered in unpublished poetry, he develops a new approach to The Wasteland that shows for the first time how the separate voices of the poem relate to the poem's protagonist, how they simultaneously shape his experience of release, and how they culminate in a prophetic statement. Calling attention to the operation of play, routines, and cycles in the unpublished and familiar works, to the interplay of City and Psyche, and to the relationship between voices and vision, the book establishes the undeniable value of Eliot's unpublished verse in shaping the form and preoccupations of his early poetry.