by T.S. Eliot(Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 1991)
Hardcover, 221 Pages, Poetry Anthology
ABCD Rating: CHECK OUT
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
From the Cover: In this volume, one of the most distinguished poets of our century selected all of his poetry through 1962 that he wished to preserve. An event of major literary significance, Collected Poems 1909-1962 was published on T.S. Eliot’s seventy-fifth birthday. It offers the complete text of Collected Poems 1909-1935, the full text of Four Quartets, and several other poems. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, widely honored for his poetry, criticism, essays, and plays, T.S. Eliot exerted a profound influence on his contemporaries in the arts as well as on a great international audience of readers.
My Review: I do not believe that there are very many people that can take an extended reading of T.S. Eliot. It is true that the man is talented, and his poetry is some of the greatest and most literary that is around … but it is extraordinarily dense writing, difficult to unpack and often just downright depressing.
Not that that in and of itself makes his poetry bad. In fact, Eliot’s “lost” and “searching” and “depressed” poetry (like “The Hollow Men,” like “The Waste Land,” like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”) is so very much better than his poetry after his conversion to the Anglican Church (like “The Four Quartets” and “Ash Wednesday”) and all of it is heads and shoulders over Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats which—according to my Modern American Lit professor—was written in a fit of self-doubt and craving after the approval of the critics. (He also said that it was made even worse by Andrew Lloyd Webber and that the only person that could sit through every performance of the musical’s 21 year run without a lobotomy or committing suicide would be Eliot himself, because it was exactly what the poet was looking for with those poems.)
Yet, whether Eliot’s poems were written before or after his conversion, they are all about one thing: the journey to find a centering force in his life. The difference comes in that the pre-conversion poems all have a sense of searching and ambiguousness about them. For example, “The Waste Land” seems to say, well, here is the Waste Land, there is nothing here to center upon … but I will keep searching and both “Prufrock” and “Hollow Men” have similar sentiments: the world is a barren place, a meaningless place, but there must be meaning somewhere and even though I have not found it, I will keep searching.
This sentiment, however, is summed up the best in Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi” where in the journey of the magi to visit the Christ child becomes a moment of reflection on a world that has changed, and a questioning of one’s place in this “new world.” It is a brilliant poem.
The switch in Eliot’s message comes after his conversion to the Anglican Church (as I mentioned above). As in his earlier poems, Eliot’s post-conversion poetry is about journey and finding a centering force. The difference is that in these later poems, the centering force is not something unknown, but is Christ and Christian orthodoxy, and that takes a lot of the power out of Eliot’s poetry. “The Four Quartets” is rambling, pedantic and seems more like a lecture from a professor of theology than a poet, and “Ash Wednesday” is reduced to Christian cheerleading with lines like “The right time and the right place are not here / No place of grace for those who avoid the face / No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice.”
(No place of grace for those who avoid the face! AGAIN! No place of grace for those who avoid the face! ONE MORE TIME! No place of grace for those who avoid the face! GOOOOOOOOOOOOO JESUS!)
The didactic nature of these later poems simply steals the bite and force of Eliot’s message, leaving the Reader wishing for more verse like “The Waste Land” which, while depressing, at least has the literary power and earnest desire to find an answer, not point to a foregone conclusion.
After reading the poetry of Robert Frost, who also talks of journeys and finding that which will sustain you, Eliot can seem a little overwhelming, and rightly so; Eliot was an elitist who often didn’t care what others thought and couldn’t be bothered if his Readers understood his message (compare to Frost whose persona was that of a kindly country grandfather-farmer dispensing wisdom in verse form).
It takes a strong will and a strong intellect to read Eliot and come away with something—and I am not one of those people. I have little patience for Eliot’s brand of elitism and poetic obfuscation, and in all honesty, if it was not assigned, I would probably not be reading T.S. Eliot for pleasure. That is not to say I did not find it a learning experience … I did indeed learn a lot from reading and studying Eliot, but outside of the classroom, I doubt I’ll have much use for him or his poetry, unlike Robert Frost or William Carlos Williams. But, that’s just me.
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