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3-star collection of a 10-star poet's work Jan 17, 2000 (102 of 103 found this helpful)
T. S. Eliot was arguably the greatest poet of the 20th century, but this collection is far from ideal. Alert readers will have already noticed the ominous qualifier "1909-1950" in the title; this book does *not* include the last two plays ("The Confidential Clerk" and "The Elder Statesman"), the last Ariel poem ("The Cultivation of Christmas Trees"), or the handful of Occasional Verses included in "Collected Poems 1909-1962." In addition, the typography in this volume is claustrophobic in the early poems. TSE's style is concentrated and intense, and virtually every collection of his work has the sense to begin each poem on a new page. This book, unfortunately, is the exception: it crams the poems together like classified ads.
The One True Eliot Collection was never published in the United States: "The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot" (Faber and Faber, 1969 and later reprintings). It's worth looking on for a used copy since this book contains virtually all the published poems, all five plays, and even "Poems Published in Early Youth." In the meantime, U.S. readers are better off skipping the 1909-1950 volume. Get "Collected Poems 1909-1962" and buy the plays separately -- along with Old Possum's Book of You-Know-Whats, if you insist.
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Prometheus of modern poetry May 26, 2001 (32 of 33 found this helpful)
I became familiar with Eliot's work chronologically, learning something new at each step. "Prufrock" introduced me to modern poetical structure, "The Waste Land" showed me how literary allusion can enrich verse, "Ash-Wednesday" refreshed the world of religious poetry, and the supernal "Four Quartets" was for me a metaphysical insight of the greatest beauty.
Eliot is without a doubt the finest poet of the 20th century, perhaps the finest poet ever. His contributions to the poets who came after him, and to literature in general, are persistently evident. Eliot doesn't always succeed, and many of his poems seem trite and pretentious, but when he succeeds he hits dead on with poetry perfect in form, balance, and sound. There is the man here, the poet as reflected in his own work, but there is also common human experience through looking at history ("The Waste Land") and meditating on Man's relationship with the Divine and the eternal (Ariel Poems, and most of his output after 1928).
HOWEVER, this edition of his "collected works," COMPLETE POEMS AND PLAYS: 1909-1950 lacks several last poems which can be found in COLLECTED POEMS 1909-1962. I recommend that edition, as tt is worth missing out on Eliot's plays in order to have a truly complete collection of his sublime verse.
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I have heard the mermaids singing... May 23, 2004 (7 of 7 found this helpful)
An excellent collection of the vast majority of his published works.
While Eliot lived into the sixties, there is an inevitable temptation to concentrate on his earlier classic works such as The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock, which yielded the above line, The Waste Land and The Hollow Men above all.
A lot of Eliot's perspectives involve psychological impotence, and a majestic failure to act, and be a part of events, of the World, the Life, if you like; such as in the lines "I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing for me."
Here, he writes about isolation and alienation, with accompanying non-participation. The impotent voyeur, as in Joyce's Ulysses, based on the classical myth. Joyce's Sirens are Lydia and Mina, the 'sexy barmaids' at the Ormond Hotel. Bloom can hear their siren song from the next bar, as they lure the male clientele to part with their cash, but he is separate from events; reflecting cyborg-like on their music which he terms 'musemathematics'.
While The Waste Land and The Hollow Men in particular were clearly written during a time of deep spiritual crisis, Eliot did transcend this period and they are not really representative of his later life philosophy.
One stanza from T S Eliot's The Hollow Men, became the source of Nevil Shute's book title On The Beach - this being his 1957 post-apocalyptic novel which later appeared as the 1963 Gregory Peck movie of the same name, about the last doomed survivors of a nuclear holocaust.
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
The J G Ballardesque inner landscape that Eliot creates, of decaying cities and civilizations and the encroaching spiritual desert, `sunlight on a broken column', the final phase of extreme Entropy, the suppression of the Eternal Feminine, is just all part of the ultimate fear of nothingness or perhaps meaninglessness that has gnawed away at the human psyche for eons.
Just as Ballard's ancient nuclear test site in The Terminal Beach, replete with its decrepit bunkers and blockhouses, is 'a fossil of Time Future', so too is Eliot's Waste Land a metaphor for the human inability to perceive Time and to merge with the flow of the Universe.
A genius? Absolutely no question about it.
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I own a first edition Jun 5, 2000 (6 of 13 found this helpful)
I bought this book back in college (I was premed). Of all the old books on my shelves, this one gets pulled out the most often. Like some of the other reviewers, I smile quietly when I see C. S. Lewis's criticisms of Eliot. They share a shelf in my home.
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"Redeem the time/Redeem the dream" Jun 29, 1997 (6 of 10 found this helpful)
Eliot was a failure. That's right, a failure. He spent his whole life lamenting that the critics got him wrong. Ironically, Eliot had a decades-long feud with my other favorite writer, C. S. Lewis, because Lewis disliked Eliot's modern style. Yet I think much of what Lewis criticized in Eliot was based upon the standard critics' interpretations, rather than on what Eliot intended (does Prufrock not, prophetically, lament "That's not what I meant at all?"). Eliot may have initiated a new era in poetry, but what he initiated was a rebellion against 19th-century romanticism and liberalism. When studied on a deeper level than mere style, one sees that Eliot's poetry is at heart traditional and anti-Modern, overladen with Christian and Oriental thought. There is no better analysis of Eliot, in my opinion, than Russell Kirk's _Eliot and His Age_. Poems which the critics see as discussions of failed romance are actually laments about failure to appreciate art, and descriptions of the hell in which we live. Critics see a decline from "Prufrock" to "Ash Wednesday", but I (like Kirk) see the fulfillment of Eliot in his later poetry: he tells us what's wrong with the world, and then he points to a higher standard, "redeeming the time" as the voice calls out in "Ash Wednesday"