Rating: 
Summary: I defer.
Review: A reader said it best
Rating:
Summary: Eliot at his best
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: I have heard the mermaids singing...
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: "Redeem the time/Redeem the dream"
Review: 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"
Rating:
Summary: the essential eliot
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A pleasure to own!
Review: His language is effortless in its flow and it is conducive to deep meditation in its style. After reading 'Prufrock', and the 'Hollow Men' I got the sense that this is something truly withstanding and classic - one of our bards of the 20th century.
Only a handfull of modern poets stick in my mind - Elliot, Cummings, Rilke, and Yeats are among them!
Rating:
Summary: Prometheus of modern poetry
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Prometheus of modern poetry
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: I own a first edition
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Oh, Go On! You NEED this collection!
Review: 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.
|
