The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot

Primitive and metropolitan life nourished T. S. Eliot's imagination and emerged as recurrent themes in his work. Examining these twin concerns, Robert Crawford sheds new light on the poet's achievement--particularly those works that culminated in The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes--and clarifies Eliot's relentless obsession with "savages" and sophisticates.

The twin concerns of primitive and metropolitan life nourished T.S. Eliot's imagination through his childhood and student years and developed to mould and underpin his writing. Ranging from Dr Sweany of St Louis and Eliot's intense interest in anthropology to his interest in Victorian urban writing and popular American models, this book throws new light on Eliot's major works, particularly on The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes. In understanding how a great poet obsessively and continually brought together `savages' and the sophisticated as well as slum-dwelling members of modern urban society, we can see his work afresh as possessing remarkable and profound excitement as well as unusual integrity.