To understand Eliot's weighty contribution to the pantheon of modernism, one must take account of his dramatic career. Where the Words Are Valid brings to modernist scholars' serious attention a large body of work that has often been glibly patronized and relegated to near-obscurity. Eliot's plays embody more significant connections than disruptions with the rest of his work, and are integrally related to the other elements of his oeuvre. Further, they contain a richly suggestive autobiographical vein that illuminates the persona and psyche of Eliot the playwright and, as well, throwbacks to Eliot as a younger poet and critic.
Treats Eliot's seven plays as central to the understanding of the rest of his work, and points out numerous literary and personal sources of Eliot's modernist sensibility.
Malamud (English, Georgia State U.) explores the way Eliot's plays, unlike his poetry, embody a quest for social unity and coherence. But while his plays present a revision of the harshly fragmented, incommunicable, solipsistic poetic ethos for which Eliot is best known, they are not a wholesale refutation of it. In fact, according to Malamud, his poetry and drama are ultimately part of a unified and consistent undertaking and neither can be fully appreciated without the other. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.
