Customer Reviews

Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917

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Eliot is known to undergrads and postgrads as the genius poet of "Four Quartets" and "The Wasteland;" a man who wrote some of the greatest and most confusing verse of the twentieth century. While the rewards of exploration into such poems are certainly great, it is perhaps a more human need for emotional comfort. The above, professional reviews focus on the small section of bawdry verse in the work, but the majority of this collection is devoted to the great, early emotional works of Eliot. The only familiar poem to most readers will probably be "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (with a previously unpublished extension) and a more perfect banner work could not have been chosen. The poems are beautiful, concise, imagistic, painful, somber, but most of all lonely. Here in his early years Eliot is not living in an academic world, simply the world--with love, hypocrisy, doubt, joy, and emptiness. To read the greatest poet of our centu! ry describe that which is greatly profound is a privilege, here to read him describe what is simply profound is a gift. I recommend this book over all other collections of Eliot's or anyone else's verse. If you were not one of the 11th graders who discarded Prufrock as a helpless reject, and instead saw him as a deeply lonely individual much like ourselves, this volume is for you. It will touch your life and make you just that much more complete.

These are first sketches that prefigure the later and greater work and, as such, they may be useful as an intro to the "Waste Land." Those with no desire to return to that godforsaken place will find these discrete bits more digestible and not lacking in Eliot's uniquely haunting music. Among my favorites are "Interlude in London" and "Oh little voices in the throats of men." For those interested in tracing the voices in Eliot's "echo chamber," there are copious notes detailing his allusions and borrowings.If you are a serious Eliot connoisseur, you will be tickled by his long-lost bawdy verse.

It's not Eliot's best work of course, but that's not why I bought it. I ordered this collection to better understand Eliot before he became Eliot. I found a few books of his very early poetry in my local university's library, but nothing for the years between childhood and Prufrock. I think I've gained a little more insight into one of my favorite modern poets.