T.S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration

Richard Badenhausen examines the crucial role that collaboration with other writers played in the development of T. S. Eliot’s works from the earliest poetry and unpublished prose to the late plays. He demonstrates Eliot’s dependence on collaboration in order to create, but also his struggle to accept the implications of the process. In case-studies of Eliot’s collaborations, Badenhausen reveals for the first time the complexities of Eliot’s theory and practice of collaboration. Examining a wide range of familiar and uncollected materials, Badenhausen explores Eliot’s social, psychological, textual encounters with collaborators such as Ezra Pound, John Hayward, Martin Browne, and Vivienne Eliot, among others. Finally, this study shows how Eliot\'s later work increasingly accommodates his audience as he attempted to apply his theories of collaboration more broadly to social, cultural, and political concerns.

• The first full study of the importance of collaboration to Eliot’s works • Badenhausen charts how Eliot’s major and minor works came about in collaboration with others • Particular focus on Pound’s influence on The Waste Land as well as contributions by Vivienne Eliot, the poet’s first wife, and others

Introduction: reaching the stillness of music; 1. ‘Speaking as ourselves’: authorship, impersonality, and the creative process in the early essays; 2. A conversation about ‘the longest poem in the English langwidge’: Pound, Eliot, and The Waste Land; 3. ‘Helping the poets write for the theatre’: the transitional essays on collaboration, community, and drama; 4. A dramatist and his midwives: Eliot’s collaborations in the theater; 5. The possum and the ‘creating critick’: Eliot’s collaboration with John Hayward; Conclusion: Placing collaboration in perspective: voice and influence in the late essays.

\'T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration represents a lively and imortant contribution to modernist studies.\' The Review of English Studies

\'Badenhausen\'s sensitive, meticulously argued study does much to persuade us that in light of current world events Eliot\'s paradoxical ruminations on the function of art as a socially unifying force in times of great discord merit renewed critical attention.\' English Literature in Transition

\' … a rich and complex consideration of Eliot\'s writing and writing habits, and of Eliot\'s relation to his work, his readers and tradition … a well-researched, thought-provoking and enjoyable exploration of a key aspect of creativity of a master writer.\' Shyamal Bagchee, University of Alberta

\' … a richly detailed and insightfully argued study that should change the terms of Eliot scholarship for some time to come.\' Textual Culture