Collected Poems, 1909–1935
by T. S. Eliot
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This was a nice tactile experience. The book was published in 1932 and had apparently had a replacement binding sometime in the Nixon administration. It felt sleek in my hand.
I bought it for fifty cents as our local library continues its purge, freeing the stacks for a conference area for Rotarians and Lyft team meetings.
The volume marked a nice return to The Waste Land. I don't believe I had read Ash Wednesday before and was impressed. We all know the grief in each handful of dust. I found this observation especially poignant as this particular book was being cast out of the library.
I bought it for fifty cents as our local library continues its purge, freeing the stacks for a conference area for Rotarians and Lyft team meetings.
The volume marked a nice return to The Waste Land. I don't believe I had read Ash Wednesday before and was impressed. We all know the grief in each handful of dust. I found this observation especially poignant as this particular book was being cast out of the library.
At long last, I’ve tried T. S. Eliot’s poetry.
Maybe I’ll put Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot back on the shelf, and try again after a while. Maybe not.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men”
From “The Hollow Men,” 1925
It’s not that I mind Eliot’s deliberate contradictions so much. I’m willing to be provoked. I’m open to being tantalized. I’m ready to be pushed or pulled outside my comfort zone.
The sticky point for me, with Eliot’s poetry, is that I never seem to get to the point, or maybe I simply don’t get the point. When I get to the end of one of his longish poems, I’m really not sure where I started, or where I wandered, or where I arrived.
I find little coherence in Eliot’s words and phrases and show more passages.
I think of myself as a wordsmith, and I love the beauty of elegant phrases and shimmering, specific, steely, selective, stately, splendid words that tell a delicious story or evoke a bloom of emotion.
For my taste, T. S. Eliot’s poetry isn’t tasty, and it’s a bloomin’ wasteland of jumbled words, fractured images and unfinished imaginations.
If you’re wondering where all the flowers have gone, don’t look for answers in Eliot’s work.
More on my blogs:
http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/
http://historybottomlines.blogspot.com/ show less
Maybe I’ll put Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot back on the shelf, and try again after a while. Maybe not.
“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men”
From “The Hollow Men,” 1925
It’s not that I mind Eliot’s deliberate contradictions so much. I’m willing to be provoked. I’m open to being tantalized. I’m ready to be pushed or pulled outside my comfort zone.
The sticky point for me, with Eliot’s poetry, is that I never seem to get to the point, or maybe I simply don’t get the point. When I get to the end of one of his longish poems, I’m really not sure where I started, or where I wandered, or where I arrived.
I find little coherence in Eliot’s words and phrases and show more passages.
I think of myself as a wordsmith, and I love the beauty of elegant phrases and shimmering, specific, steely, selective, stately, splendid words that tell a delicious story or evoke a bloom of emotion.
For my taste, T. S. Eliot’s poetry isn’t tasty, and it’s a bloomin’ wasteland of jumbled words, fractured images and unfinished imaginations.
If you’re wondering where all the flowers have gone, don’t look for answers in Eliot’s work.
More on my blogs:
http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/
http://historybottomlines.blogspot.com/ show less
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Trinity College Booklist (1951): Class Ten, English Literature
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T. S. Eliot is considered by many to be a literary genius and one of the most influential men of letters during the half-century after World War I. He was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. Eliot attended Harvard University, with time abroad pursuing graduate studies at the Sorbonne, Marburg, and Oxford. The outbreak of World War show more I prevented his return to the United States, and, persuaded by Ezra Pound to remain in England, he decided to settle there permanently. He published his influential early criticism, much of it written as occasional pieces for literary periodicals. He developed such doctrines as the "dissociation of sensibility" and the "objective correlative" and elaborated his views on wit and on the relation of tradition to the individual talent. Eliot by this time had left his early, derivative verse far behind and had begun to publish avant-garde poetry (including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which exploited fresh rhythms, abrupt juxtapositions, contemporary subject matter, and witty allusion. This period of creativity also resulted in another collection of verse (including "Gerontian") and culminated in The Waste Land, a masterpiece published in 1922 and produced partly during a period of psychological breakdown while married to his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot. In 1922, Eliot became a director of the Faber & Faber publishing house, and in 1927 he became a British citizen and joined the Church of England. Thereafter, his career underwent a change. With the publication of Ash Wednesday in 1930, his poetry became more overtly Christian. As editor of the influential literary magazine The Criterion, he turned his hand to social as well as literary criticism, with an increasingly conservative orientation. His religious poetry culminated in Four Quartets, published individually from 1936 onward and collectively in 1943. This work is often considered to be his greatest poetic achievement. Eliot also wrote poetry in a much lighter vein, such as Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection that was used during the early 1980s as the basis for the musical, Cats. In addition to his contributions in poetry and criticism, Eliot is the pivotal verse dramatist of this century. He followed the lead of William Butler Yeats in attempting to revive metrical language in the theater. But, unlike Yeats, Eliot wanted a dramatic verse that would be self-effacing, capable of expressing the most prosaic passages in a play, and an insistent, undetected presence capable of elevating itself at a moment's notice. His progression from the pageant The Rock (1934) and Murder in the Cathedral (1935), written for the Canterbury Festival, through The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949), a West End hit, was thus a matter of neutralizing obvious poetic effects and bringing prose passages into the flow of verse. Recent critics have seen Eliot as a divided figure, covertly attracted to the very elements (romanticism, personality, heresy) he overtly condemned. His early attacks on romantic poets, for example, often reveal him as a romantic against the grain. The same divisions carry over into his verse, where violence struggles against restraint, emotion against order, and imagination against ironic detachment. This Eliot is more human and more attractive to contemporary taste. During his lifetime, Eliot received many honors and awards, including the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Contains
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Collected Poems, 1909–1935
- Original publication date
- 1936
- People/Characters
- J. Alfred Prufrock, Gerontion, Sweeney
- Dedication
- For Jean Verdenal, 1889-1915 mort aux Dardanelles
- First words
- Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a Patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in on... (show all)e-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question. . .
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always --
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after. - Disambiguation notice
- Contains no poems later than 1935!
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- Reviews
- 2
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- (4.37)
- Languages
- English
- Media
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- ASINs
- 33
