“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.” Those famous concluding lines of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” have resonated with readers for nearly a century. As with “April is the cruelest month,” from The Waste Land and “Do I dare disturb the universe?,” from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Eliot’s words have permanently entered our cultural bloodstream. Through the poems in this volume, representing his first four published collections, Eliot reshaped modern literature with a daring and overpowering vision of a decaying civilization and the urgent need for spiritual renewal.
