T. S. Eliot's lifelong quest for a world of the spirit is the theme of this book by leading Eliot scholar A. David Moody. The first four essays in the collection map Eliot's spiritual geography: the American taproot of his poetry, his profound engagement with the philosophy and religion of India, his near and yet detached relations with England, and his problematic cultivation of a European mind. At the centre of the collection is a study of the Latin poem Pervigilium Veneris, a fragment of which figures enigmatically in the concluding lines of The Waste Land. The third part of the collection is a set of five investigations of Eliot's poems, dealing particularly with The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets, and attending to how they express and shape what he called 'the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being'.

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A. David Moody's Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet was published to acclaim in 1979, with a successful paperback following in 1980. This carefully revised and corrected second edition, with a specially written preface and a new appendix, meets the demand for one of the classic studies of the twentieth century's best-known poet.

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Hunger is a pervasive trope in Beckett's major works of the post-war period. This article examines the possibilities for situating this trope historically. It seeks to mediate between the tendency of hunger to resist contextual markers, and the competing historical narratives of Irish and French history – the Famine and hunger strikes on the one hand, and World War II rationing and food shortages on the other – that predispose us to read hunger as a point of engagement with history and nation.