These expert studies in some of the key figures behind Eliot's modernism - Mallarme, Frazer, F.H. Bradley, and T.E. Hulme - yield fresh insights which are brought to bear most fruitfully on his major poems ""Gerontion"", ""The Waste Land"" and ""Four Quartets"". A spacious and wide-ranging book by a scholar and teacher, is should be welcomed by other Eliot scholars and their students for the skill with which it situates Eliot's work in a web of modernist intellectual and cultural relations. As intellectual history, ""Mastery and Escape"" provides essential background by connecting high modernism to 19th-century philosophy and science. The book succeeds in bringing Eliot's intellectual contexts to bear on his poems.