The Complete Poems and Plays

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 show more 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.

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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. show less

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"

Probably the only poet I have read the entire collected works of. (Verse work he chose to publish in his lifetime, that is.) Having not been prolific, Eliot achieved an extraordinarily high average standard.
I do not profess to "understand" some of Eliot's more notoriously obscure poems, however, I love them for the sound they make.

My edition of this book (Harcourt, Brace and World, 1952) has no notes, a most unfortunate omission.