‘The kind of poetry that I needed to teach me the use of My own voice, did not exist in English at all, it was only to be found in French’, admitted T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) in 1940. ‘I am an English poet of American origin who learnt his art under the aegis of Baudelaire and the baudelairian lineage of poets’, he again stated significantly in 1948, The year of his Nobel Prize. Where the dreams cross: T.S. Eliot and French poetry reconstructs the poetic career of one of the major poets of the twentieth century by closely analysing his creative responses to his favourite French poets and critics, who were influential in Eliot’s development, and of their interrelations with each other, together with the contexts in which Eliot was exposed to their Workspace of which enabled the author to cast a newlight on an insufficient considered area and unearth much that was draped in mystery. Vivid, amusing, and in a sense warm and consistently interesting, this book seems to have unmistakable ancient Mariner gifts— it grips one and convinces. Regarded by Frank kermode and others as a landmark in Eliot criticism, this book is, according to the times higher education supplement, ‘an epiphany which unlocked a genius’.
Chinmoy Guha is Professor of English at the University of Calcutta and a distinguished French scholar. The French Government has honoured him with the titles of Chevalier des Palmes académiques and Chevalier des Arts and des Lettres. The French President has recently conferred on him the prestigious title of Chevalier de l’Ordre national du mérite. Guha has served as Vice-Chancellor, Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, and Director of Publications, Embassy of France, New Delhi. He has lectured at the universities of Paris, Edinburgh, Oxford, and the Institute of European Studies, Belgrade. His works include Bridging East and West: Rabindranath Tagore and Romain Rolland Correspondence 1919-1940, and translations of La Rochefoucauld, Flaubert, and André Gide. He has won the Sahitya Akademi Award 2019 for his book of essays titled Ghumer Darja Thele.