"Obviously something more than a successful play, it is the practical demonstration of a patently conceived theory of dramatic form, and as such of high historical interest."--Times Literary Supplement
"Eliot has attempted here something very daring and well worth doing. He has taken the ordinary West End drawing room comedy convention - understatement, upper-class accents and all - and used it as a vehicle for utterly serious ideas." --The Observer
"An authentic modern masterpiece" (New York Post)--this is T.S. Eliot's verse play about the search for meaning, in which a mysterious psychiatrist is the catalyst for a shift in a couple's relationship after appearing at a cocktail party.
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot died in 1965.
Author of Hannah Arendt and What Remains. Associate Faculty @BklynInstitute Writing a book about loneliness.
Tonight I have to give a talk on loneliness at a cocktail party in NYC and I think I'll just read from T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party. Nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to.