Customer Reviews

Selected Poems

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I thought that this book was a great introduction to T. S. Eliot. It contains most of his really famous pieces, including The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, A Love Song for J. Alfred Prufrock, and many others. If you like it, you might also try "Murder in the Cathedral."

If you can only get one book of poems, get this one. It has the most important poems before "Four Quartets". If you want more,get also "Four Quartets" and "Murder in the Cathedral" or, even better, get the collected poems.

It took me sometime before I could genuinely come to understand and appreciate his poetry: yet, nevertheless, the writings of American-born, anglocized author T.S Eliot have always held a peculiar fascination for me, and, it seems, for a number of other writers and laypeople as well. From the personal yet somehow universal, melancholy and self-doubting music of "The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to the wild, multi-cultural, history spanning visions of urban chaos in "The Wasteland", Eliot's oeuvre is rich in religious, political, and philosophical themes, and played an enormous role in shaping the development of poetry in the twentieth-century (not to mention, on an obviously less signficant level, my own writing). Reading Eliot's serious poetry, however, requires a great deal of analytical prowess and is often a rather depressing experience (particularly in the beautiful "Prufrock"): nevertheless, those with patience will find that it is richly rewarding and can be appreciated on a superificial level simply for the entrancing rhythm of the music and haunting nature of the imagery, which, though informed by a number of sources, including Shakespeare, Dante, and Baudelaire, are written in a voice which is always distinctive and wholly original.

T.S. Eliot writes with such fluidity, you would think that he was inspired by spirits, who, by virtue of being dead, have all the time in the world to come up with such eloquence.

T.S. Eliot is a major figure in 20th century literature for criticism, publishing and poetry. On the critical front he is known for his rediscovery of the Metaphysical poets Donne and Marvell, his collections of essays The Sacred Wood and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism; as a publisher he was a director of Faber and built up a stable of modern poets such as Auden and Ezra Pound.

It is, however, for his poetry that he will surely last and this collection gives a marvelous selection of his works. The first poem in this collection The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a masterwork with superb imagery and a marvelous sense of humour and irony as it gives us the words of a man who seems much older than Eliot must have been when he wrote it, it was first published while he was in his twenties.

While some of his poetry seems to miss the mark as too dense and perhaps overly constructed others have rich layers of imagery and allusion that reward a little effort and rereading with a sense of large and vivid meaning and depth. The Waste Land, one of Eliots most famous poems and responsible, along with other poems of the period such as The Hollow Men, in giving Eliot a reputation as one of the disillusioned modern poets. Eliot denied this, saying he gave the illusion of being disillusioned. The Wasteland is four hundred lines long and is quite enigmatic, some scholars have said that it may have been less enigmatic before Ezra Pound helped and convinced Eliot to cut it back from an original 800 lines.

The last major work in this volume is The Four Quartets. It is impossible in a short review to summarise the brilliance of these works. Written in the late thirties they are a masterful summation of the concerns of Eliots earlier works and a culmination of his examination of his own personal Christianity.

Between these three peaks are many works almost their equal. Sweeney Agonistes, Ash Wednesday, The Hollow Men, and excerpts from the The Rock among them.

To conclude this collection is a wonderful summary of the poetic works of one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. For a complete overview of Eliot you should read at least one of his plays (Murder In The Cathedral is my favourite) and one of his volumes of critical essays such as the two mentioned earlier. I would recommend this volume to anyone who enjoys poetry, particularly those who enjoy reading poetry over and over again.

T.S. is not for the novice reader. If you're going to delve into this book, take a good drink with you. As I read TS's poetry, I am reminded of the style of William Faulkner, in terms of diffculty in understanding and comprehension - except in poetry. You'll read his poems over two and three, maybe ten times before any sense is made. However, once you grasp the concept, you'll never forget it. I think TS's poetry are his best works. His lectures are fantastic also. If this is your first TS work, kudos for having guts to take on TS's intriguing poetic library!! Love Story of J Alfred Prufrock is definitely my favorite of TS's poetic masterpieces :)

For some reason most poetry does not really resonate with me. One of the only poets I can stand is T.S. Eliot. His poetry is absurd and lyrical, providing just the barest glimpses at the underlying meaning. But the images stay with me.

I admit I don't know a lot about poetry. For that reason I acknowledge that my review of Eliot's work is written with deference to other reviewers, i.e., I rely on their comments after having read Eliot's work. So this review is somewhat synergistic in that I've taken their comments into account as I offer my own observations.

One of my favorites in this work is from "Choruses From 'The Rock'":

"The Lord who created must wich us to create and employ our creation again in His service.
Which is already His service in creating.
For man is joined spirit and body.
Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in man;
Visible and invisible must meet in His temple;
You must not deny the body.
...For the work of creation is never without travail;"

This book arrived in mint condition and in a timely manner. I'm afraid that the book was hard to understand for me.