title: The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry
author:  T. S. Eliot 
description: Consisting of 11 lectures Eliot delivered at universities, this collection explores his views on the relation of thought to feeling in verse.
zlib_text: THE INVISIBLE POET: 
  T. S. ELIOT 
  by Hugh Kenner 
  Though Pruf rock is the best known 
  poem 
  in 
  English 
  since 
  the 
  Rubaiyat, 
  though there are as many handbooks as 
  are needed, and though T. S. Eliot is a 
  Nobel Prize winner and a holder of the 
  Order of Merit, �emains the Invisible 
  Poet 45 
  years 
  • 
  his public debut. 
  This 
  Hugh 
  Ken er 
  ascribes 
  to 
  "the 
  nature 
  of 
  his 
  writing, 
  which 
  resists 
  elucidation 
  as 
  stubbornly as 
  Alice 
  in 
  Wonderland." Consequently Mr. Kenner 
  has devised a new critical approach to 
  Eliot's work, designed not to explain it 
  but to raise it to visibility. For the first 
  time Eliot's verse and prose are related 
  to 
  the 
  systematic 
  anonymity 
  of 
  their 
  creator, his elaborate program, both a 
  temperamental and a strategic necessity, 
  of camouflaging himself as an orthodox 
  British man of letters. The hiatus be­
  tween Old Possum and the author of 
  The 
  Waste Land closes. For the fim 
  time, also, 
  the pivotal 
  assumptions 
  of 
  his criticism are tra