AFTER STRANGE GODS: A Primer of Modern Heresy.

First edition, first printing. Original black cloth lettered in gilt to the spine, in dustwrapper. A near fine copy, the binding square and firm, the cloth and gilt sharp, the contents clean throughout. Lower and fore-edges untrimmed. Very light scattered spots to endpapers. In the lightly rubbed dustwrapper, a little darkened to the spine, with a few nicks and chips to spine tips, edges and corners. Not price-clipped (3s. 6d. net to the front flap). A very presentable copy of Eliot's controversial 1933 Page-Barbour Lectures.

Eliot delivered the three lectures published as 'After Strange Gods' as the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia in 1933. The lectures pick up the implications of the earlier essay, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', written fifteen years earlier and collected in 'The Sacred Wood' (1920). The tradition addressed in that essay was literary; by the early thirties, Eliot (a recent convert to Christianity) was more concerned with cultural tradition, and of religion in particular, the lectures diagnosing a "weakness of modern literature, indicative of the weakness of the modern world in general", as the jacket has it. Written, as Jeffrey Meyers notes, "during a period of intense emotional turmoil and personal guilt" surrounding the breakdown of Eliot's first marriage, the published lectures are best known today for having been withdrawn by the author after a single reprint and having never been reissued. This may or may not have been owing to a passage which is hard not to read as an expression of anti-semitism, a passage which may or may not have been symptomatic of emotional turmoil. The lectures are also notable for containing Eliot's harsh opinions on Hardy and Lawrence ("Hardy is condemned and Lawrence appears as a suppôt de Satan" he wrote to Paul Elmer Moore in 1933). Describing himself in 1928 as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion", Hardy, an atheist, was for Eliot "a powerful personality uncurbed by any institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs". It is an opposition presented at its starkest in these lectures. Published 22 February 1934, 3000 copies were printed (Gallup A25a).