T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University) poet is chosen each year to judge the collections, and to select the winner and several finalists. The winners, collection titles, and judges of the annual Prize are listed below. In addition to the winner, several finalists are announced for each year's competition. The complete list of winners and finalists is posted at the Truman State University Press website. As examples, Deborah Warren and A. M. Juster were finalists, and both Patty Seyburn and Daniel Bourne have been finalists twice. T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University) The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is awarded annually by Truman State
T. S. Eliot us home all point to the pilgrim's path along the road of sanctification. With the important exception of "Four Quartets", Eliot directed much of his creative energies after "Ash Wednesday" to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in "The Waste Land". In a 1933 lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility . . . . He