T. S. Eliot is regarded as the most important poet–critic of modern times, the twentieth century’s ‘Man of Letters’ whose reputation was forged not only on the strength of his verse, but on the enduring influence of his critical writings.

The Collected Prose presents those works that Eliot allowed to reach print in the order of their final revision or printing. Publishing across four volumes, the series aims to provide an authoritative and clean-text record of Eliot’s approved texts and their revisions, beginning with his formative observations, written while he was at high school, and concluding in his final major opus, To Criticize the Critic, published in the months after his death.

This third volume collects Eliot’s prose from 1935–1950, when his works The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and The Music of Poetry (1942) would engage the seminal grounds of his Four Quartets, while his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) would appear at the moment he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was a period of experimentation in form and genre, in which writings for the theatre were taking centre stage and he was composing for the first time for children, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.