Customer Reviews

The Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950

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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.

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.

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.

Even in his lifetime Eliot became a legend, a literary figure so universally praised, so enormously influential, that some of his best works, in spite of their popularity, and perhaps because of it, have been buried by the overly abusive and vulgar public. So for the several decades after his death, his dominant spirit was--had to be--combated by those who wish to break new ground. It is true that now we can see beyond Eliot, but we hardly realize that we still must begin with him, as he himself had begun the modernist tradition nearly a century ago. This book, the complete Eliot, is possibly the single most important book in modern English poetry. Reading Yeats and Eliot side by side, we cannot help but notice that Yeats, and perhaps Stevens with him, belonged to the Romantic tradition, however they masked themselves. But Eliot is different. His poetry represents something new, but at the same time something ancient, as ancient as the Greeks that he so admired. Eliot was a beginning, in the sense that Dante, his master, was a beginning. Like Freud's, Joyce's, Kafka's, and Picasso's, Eliot's voice is unique. But hardly any major poet alive today can escape it. The truth is, we talk like Eliot whenever we want to say something meaningul or "profound"; because his voice had dominated ours, just as his imagination had become part of ours.

I'm not at all rating this book five stars; that's my rating for T.S. Eliot's plays. This book was the typical library edition and has everything wrong with it: the cover of an old, wise Eliot (why not a young maverick one?), "Complete" in the title when it's not at all complete, big, heavy, hardback and way too literary looking for the passing reader to crack the cover.

But look how much T.S. Eliot you already know. The Wasteland may be a maddingly obscure poem sequence built around a book by Jessie Weston, but Pete Townshend used the idea in a song: "Teenage Wasteland." You know from another song that T.S. Eliot, in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" said that life was measured out in coffee spoons. We all know that Old Possum's Book of Practical...plays out dramatically in a musical titled for the last word of that book...Cats. You could have tackled (or rather relaxed with) his most famous poem sequence, Four Quartets and the accompanying readers' guide by Thomas Howard.

But for all those bits of poetic imagery, you still might not stumble on the plays. I've never seen one of Eliot's plays put on, but they make wonderful reading. As an astute reviewer suggested, don't get this volume, which leaves out two of the five plays (or six if you include "Choruses from the Rock," which is not among the best). That reviewer also provided the helpful advice to track down the Faber edition which really does have all the plays. Some of them, notably Murder in the Cathedral, are available in single editions. But don't miss The Confidential Clerk, The Cocktail Party and The Elder Statesman for a great reading experience.

The only other play I know that reads this well is J. M. Barrie's original play of Peter Pan. Murder in the Cathedral is notable because it falls in the Church of England (Anglican) tradition of putting on plays at the Canterbury Festival. Charles Williams also wrote plays related to this event (Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury), as did Dorothy L. Sayers (The Zeal of Thy House, The Devil to Pay). All of which is to say that there is a lot of great dramatic writing to be rediscovered as reading as well as performance (see also my review of Christopher Fry's plays A Phoenix Too Frequent and The Lady's Not for Burning). Many Sayers readers are also aware that she wrote the first radio play for the BBC on the life of Jesus (and updated it to common language), as well as essays on her experience dealing with the Gospel accounts in dramatic form. The best known of these is "The Dogma is the Drama," available in various collections.

In spite of the drawbacks of the arrangement in this volume (as described by other reviewers infra), this remains a must-have volume for anyone interested in contemporary poetry. T.S. Eliot's *best* works are all collected here, in a readily readable and comprehensible form. I remember reading and re-reading and re-reading my copy as a youngster and it still enjoys both a place of honor on my shelf as well as the even greater honor of frequent use and perusal. Let's face it, you can't come to terms with contemporary poetry without an understanding of T.S. Eliot, and this is probably the best place to start that effort because of the comprehensive (though not exhaustive) nature of this collection. You simply have to have this volume if you are a lover of contemporary poetry.

While I am only an amateur when it comes to poetry, I believe this collection will satisfy any reader looking for a stimulating and engaging experience. I was introduced to T.S. Eliot in my high school English class and read only two of his poems from this collection: one, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and two, The Wasteland. If I had more time to spend with these poems and really analyze them, I would get even more out of them.

TS Eliot portrays an intriguing setting in The Wasteland. He alludes to various religions and gods. In particular, Eliot portrayed a modern European society lacking a sense of unity and control. He makes eccentric references to anything from religious structures, blooming flowers, praised figures, historical events, and influential European cities. After reading this poem, I highly recommend reading the novel The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. This piece by McCarthy was strongly influenced by this particular poem.

Who is Prufrock? In Eliot's, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, he depicts a modern middle-aged man who is very self-conscious; he does not dare speak of love to a woman, which is ironic to the poem's title. The poem epitomizes the frustration and self-consciousness in any human being, which makes it easy to relate to the character. What reader does not enjoy finding familiar satire between the lines of a love poem?

Eliot also references Shakespeare's Hamlet in The Love Song, alluding to his personal insecurity and mental weaknesses, as well as his incapability to handle love appropriately.

Though this is only a small window into T.S. Eliot's assorted collection, I hope I can give you an apposite perspective on his engaging work. I recommend reviewing this collection and strongly encourage spending time with these particular pieces.

A wonderful collection of most of T.S. Eliot's poetry, including The Wasteland, The Hollow Men and Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Has extensive notes by the author. A must for all Eliot fans.

In general, I am not a devotee of poetry. But early on I encountered the poetry of T.S. Eliot and became enamored with it. Off and on for over forty-five years it has spoken to me. I now own first editions of almost all of Eliot's works, but this is the book I have turned to again and again. I bought my copy of it on January 23, 1968 (the college bookstore stamp is still faintly legible) for $6.95, and it may be the most worn book in my library and one of the most annotated.

Many feel like I do about Eliot's poetry. On the other hand, there are many who deprecate the poetry and/or the poet. Whichever, to me there can be no question but that THE COMPLETE POEMS AND PLAYS of T.S. Eliot is one of the core books of Twentieth-Century English literature. (To be precise, it is Eliot's poems, and not his plays, that give the book that status. If you want ONLY the poems, an alternative is "Collected Poems, 1909-1962".)

I won't say more about the poetry. This review is simply a gesture of homage, which I will end by setting forth several of the less-famous lines that have caught my attention and stayed with me over the years.

"Here I am, an old man in a dry month"

"History has many cunning passages"

"Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow"

"The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying"

"Pray for us now and at the hour of our birth."

"Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. * * *"

"Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered."

Poetry was never my forte. Though an English major and aspiring writer, I had always preferred novels and the occasional short story. Although modern prose certainly has its fair share of ambiguity - William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and William Burroughs come to mind - poetry seemed to be the written equivalent of a Jackson Pollack painting. The literary landscape was apparently strewn with eccentrics reaching into the language, pulling out random words, throwing them at a sheet of paper, and seeing where they stuck. It is truly ironic that I finally overcame this aversion when I was introduced, in an English course during the fall of my sophomore year of college, to the one of the most impenetrable poems of them all: T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

I don't remember now, but I think I was rather horrified at first. Not only was it a long poem, it was also stuffed foreign languages and obscure literary references. I suppose it was as much the instructor as Eliot's genius that finally won me over. We had vehement political disagreements, but this particular individual was an excellent professor who truly did justice to the Modernist movement. "The Waste Land," I slowly realized, was a true masterpiece. The blend of the surreal and the mundane into a waking, blasted dreamscape; whispers of past grandeur adrift in the disillusion and decay of the present; the starkly beautiful imagery - I had read many novels, but none that affected me as profoundly as this poem.

I still cannot truly define what it is that makes Eliot so unique in my experience of poetry. Somehow, in some way, he managed to combine the abstraction of a Picasso with post-WWI trauma to capture the mood of a shocked society. Eliot introduced the Modernist rejection of realism in art and prose to a genre already known for being intangible and up in the air. Eliot's poetry is reminiscent of the dissonance and atonality of a Stravinsky piece: jarring at times, seemingly meaningless, felt rather than concretely understood or identified. His poems simply give rise to a moment or an emotion in a manner that makes perfect sense without the candor of prose. It is as though his metaphors and images were instinctive rather than intellectual. I honestly cannot adequately explain it. All I can offer is an Emily Dickinson quote (another poet I have come to enjoy since discovering Eliot): "When I feel as though the top of my head has been taken off, I know that is poetry."

(In other words: yes, this book is highly recommended.)