Rating: 
Summary: Overrated (but deservedly so)
Review: The most discussed, frequently invoked 20th-century poet in both American as well as British literature academic arenas (the advantage of a St. Louis birth place and brief Harvard education), Eliot offers toe-holds, certainties, and assurances to readers even as he satisfies their need to proclaim their own latter-day modernity. Compare Eliot to his immediate predecessor, Mathew Arnold, the man-of-letters, poet, and cultural critic of his time. Like Eliot's, Arnold's poetic output was relatively modest, and his cultural criticism, like Eliot's, exposed the barrenness, fragmentation, excessive subjectivity and self-consciousness of the present while proclaiming the triumphant unity, objectivity, and visionary perspective of an earlier poetry.But whereas Arnold lays upon the reader the onerous project of reclaiming Greek epic and tragedy, Eliot asks us merely to make touch with the archetypal landscape of the unconscious self and to reclaim the concrete and clever poetry of Shakespeare's immediate descendants, the "Metaphysics." And whereas Arnold in his poetry struggles to overcome his own romanticism, more often than not demonstrating an inability to produce poetry capable of rising above repetitious elegy and brooding despair, Eliot's offers us a body of work that is remarkably coherent, whole, of a piece. In the poetry from "Prufrock" through "The Wasteland" and "Hollow Men," the themes and patterns of the collective unconscious provide a solid, dependable substratum to the motifs, the repeated cultural "fragments," the objective correlatives which occur and recur until, more than in any other poetry, they lodge indelibly, memorably in the reader's consciousness. In the poetry from "Ash Wednesday" to "Four Quartets" the seemingly unconnected images and objective correlatives achieve grammatical order and thematic coherence through their elevation to the sacramental, to a vision of the "word" not as the product of the self's struggle with the deep regions of the unconscious but as the incarnation of meaning descending from higher realms of purification and grace. As the foremost representative, even prototype, of literary "modernism," Eliot's work is at the same time as neat and tidy a body of poetry as that produced by any other poet--orderly to the point of being anal. It's little wonder that he retains his interest and popularity. It's smaller wonder yet that the guy was incapable of understanding let alone appreciating a work as resistent to ready explanation, as "messy" as "Hamlet."
Rating:
Summary: Great collection
Review: This book is the definitive collection of T.S. Eliot's work. It includes an amazing collection of poems, from the renowned "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," to "The Hollow Men" and everything in between. The poems are arranged, for the most part, in chronological order, in a manner that faciliates a better understanding of Eliot's growth as a writer. It also includes plays, including the famous "Murder in the Cathedral," about Thomas a Beckett and "Cocktail Party" and "Family Reunion," both of which are considered to be some of Eliot's best work. For all those cat-lovers, it includes the entire "Old Possum's Book of Cats." At the core of the book, the reader will find "The Four Quartets" which is considered by many to be the greates of all Eliot's work.
Rating:
Summary: "Prufrock" is the best
Review: To judge from the amount of space devoted to Eliot in the latest collections of C20 American Poetry, Eliot doesn't seem to be popular any more. I guess he's regarded as too highbrow and too Catholic. Anyone who tends to believe this must read "Prufrock" and enjoy its vigour, its irony and its sheer cleverness. I always loved the tremendous amount of aggression in those early Eliot poems, very often directed at the speaker himself. Once you've come to like the young Mr Eliot, you might give the later stuff a try as well. Far from being "junk", the Quartets do not just have a fascinating musical structure, but also embody a view of life, history and religion which is not so daft after all...
Rating:
Summary: Truly, one of the giants
Review: When you think of the best poets ever, T.S. Eliot is one of those that comes to mind. His work is well crafted, intelligent, beautifully written, and has a flow to it that few poets can match. And this is a fine collection for the Eliot lover or for the reader unfamiliar with Eliot. It's divided into several sections. The first section is his Prufrock section, poems from 1917, which contains probably his finest poems: "Prufrock", "Preludes" "Rhapsody on a Windy Night", "Hysteria", among others. Then there is the Poems 1920 section which also contains many fine poems ("Sweeney Erect" and "The Hippopotamus" being my favorites). Then follows his masterpiece The Wasteland. Then The Hollow Men which is followed by the wonderful Ash Wednesday. Then the Ariel Poems (which contains "Journey of the Magi"). Then there are two unfinished poems, "Sweeney Agonistes" and "Coriolan" which I thought were weak. Maybe they would have been great had he ever finished them. Then there is a section called minor poems followed by the mediocre "Choruses from 'The Rock.' And then there is what I consider to be his true masterpiece, "Four Quartets." And the book finishes with some occasional verses, one of which is a sweet and touching poem to his wife. This is a great collection of poems.
Rating:
Summary: Good stuff
Review: Yep, this is a great collection of Eliot's works. I initially found out about Eliot throught the Movie 'Apocalypse Now' in which Brando is heard reciting the poem 'The Hollow Men'. The poem sounded so good I hunted it down and came across this little book.
My favourite poems would have to be 'The Hollow Men', 'Love song of Prufrock', 'Ash Wednesday' and 'Rannoch, by Glencoe (perfectly captured, drive through Rannoch and you'll see ;-)
Yep, definetly worth a read.
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