Arriving via UPS Tuesday.

While I love some of the poems, others I didn't care for at all. So it is hard to rate the book as a whole... These poems were selected by Eliot himself just a few years before he died as the best of his work and it certainly contains all of his most famous work EXCEPT for the fact it doesn't even have one poem from "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats". With that in mind, I cannot whole-heartedly recommend it as a single sole volume of Eliot's poetry.

I am not much of a modernist, so it is perhaps not surprising that I found many of the so-called "minor poems" more enjoyable than the more serious (and to me often more obscure) verses. My favorites:

- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- Portrait of a Lady
- The Waste Land (reviewed separately)
- Ahe-Wednesday V (If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent)
- Five-finger Exercises (esp. I Lines to a Persian Cat)
- Landscapes (esp. V Cape Ann)
- Burnt Norton from Four Quartets
- To the Indians Who Died in Africa ( )

The collected poems of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century includes several of the greatest poems of any age. Eliot was a distinctive modernist whose cerebral poetry was often moving as well. I return to this as it is in my personal pantheon of great literature. ( )

This collection of poetry is a perfect choice to read as the year winds down. Eliot's themes of cyclical time, endings leading to beginnings, and of religion form a symbiosis to the mood of the Dead Days where time slows and speeds at once in a nonlinear fashion that eventually culminates with the clock striking midnight at the dawning of a New Year. ( )

Featuring selections of many of T. S. Eliot's poems, this collection demonstrates the poet's versatility in topic and style. While I prefer the poems with shorter lines, others probably enjoy the longer ones. It's a great collection for those interested in reading this celebrated 20th century writer's work. ( )