T.S. Eliot - editor, poet, critic and publisher - was the greatest poet of his generation. The winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature, virtually every English language poet since owes him a debt of gratitude.

Voted as Britain's favourite poet in a 2009 BBC poll, Eliot selected and designed this collection himself in 1954 as an introduction to his work for new readers. Containing 'The Waste Land' and 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Selected Poems is the perfect way to begin with ...

Features a poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, this book charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events - the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement - and unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)Abundant, ecstatic, generous, courageous - this is the first American epic poem, a celebration of selfhood and a catalogue of nineteenth-century American life of all ages and races.