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Loading... Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950 (original 1952; edition 1952)by T. S. Eliot
Work InformationThe Complete Poems and Plays by T. S. Eliot (1952)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 20th Century poetry at its greatest! From post-war chaos and disarray (The Waste Land), through repentance and self-analysis (Ash Wednesday) to the exquisite musicality and peaceful perfection of Four Quartets, following in the footsteps of the great master of the past (Dante Alighieri!). My "book of the soul" Best to read Eliot's poetry several times over a leisurely timeframe. Meaning arises only after the piece is somewhat familiar, the first few encounters establish mood & setting, and perhaps voice. Allow these elements to coalesce of themselves, initially enjoy the cadence and phrasing, maybe tease out his allusions. Daniel Schwarz writes that Eliot sees verse as "the means of working out his most compelling personal dilemmas", but also "a way of putting it" for an audience. Even before reading this take (and it is but one opinion), Eliot's verse didn't seem pretentious so much as careful: he is writing for himself, worrying at something personally significant, important to put down properly. Unsurprising that so much of it isn't immediately apparent to me or anyone else. The poems almost all employ quotation or an epigraph in Greek, Latin, French; several of his early poems are entirely in French. There are no translations, and in several cases no indication of the source being quoted. Yet many of his poems are a pleasure even when inscrutable: I'm immediately drawn to "Prufrock" or The Waste Land, for example, even though I'm hardpressed to discern even partial meaning from them on first or second reading, and some like "Gerontion" are stubbornly opaque and lack the shape or wordfeel to reward me on those merits alone. As difficult as these poems are, they've entered the culture and literature, music, other poetry. I recognise lines first encountered elsewhere, and that is a primary aspect of my appreciation. Eldritch is detectable in several places, lifting lines & phrases, and I wonder now if his approach (personal meanings nested in songs meant for a listening public, crafting new pieces built around allusions) is modeled deliberately after Eliot. This edition has no commentary save Eliot's notes to The Waste Land (at publisher request to add pages, later rued by Eliot). Worth reading commentary on specific poems and revisiting regularly. // 2012 reading of verse, omitting the plays (which apparently are written as dramatic verse). Paired with the Wagner-Martin critical anthology. Look into Eliot's essays, perhaps starting with The Sacred Wood.
Early in her novel Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor describes protagonist Hazel Motes, leader of the Church without Christ, by the silhouette he casts on the sidewalk. “Haze’s shadow,” she writes, “was now behind him and now before him.” It’s a strange way to situate a character — skulking between his shadows — but it’s not unprecedented. In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot’s narrator refers to “Your shadow at morning striding behind you/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you.” Coincidence? Nobody can say for certain. But in the rare case of a critic linking O’Connor and Eliot, Sally Fitzgerald (O’Connor’s close friend) wrote that “it was Eliot and his Waste Land who provided for her the first impetus to write such a book as Wise Blood.” ContainsPoems by T. S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock [poem] by T. S. Eliot (indirect) The Naming of Cats [poem] by T. S. Eliot (indirect) Burnt Norton by T. S. Eliot (indirect) East Coker by T. S. Eliot (indirect) The Dry Salvages by T. S. Eliot (indirect) Little Gidding by T. S. Eliot (indirect) Journey of the Magi by T. S. Eliot (indirect) A song for Simeon, (The Ariel poems) by T. S. Eliot (indirect) Animula by T. S. Eliot (indirect) Marina by T. S. Eliot (indirect) The Cultivation of Christmas Trees by T. S. Eliot (indirect)
This collection contains the following: Collected Poems 1909-62 Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats Poems Written in Early Youth Murder in the Cathedral The Family Reunion The Cocktail Party The Confidential Clerk The Elder Statesman No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)821.912Literature English & Old English literatures English poetry 1900- 1900-1999 1900-1945LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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I do not profess to "understand" some of Eliot's more notoriously obscure poems, however, I love them for the sound they make. ( )