one of the best ever | Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (The Centenary Edition)

nice book | Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (The Centenary Edition) | T. S. Eliot

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	• Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (The Centenary Edition) T. S. Eliot Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 26 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Like an orchestra tuning up

The Wasteland is a poem that has been severely edited by the `superior craftsman' Pound. We have a poem in five sections in free verse, freighted with erudition, literary allusions, quotations, cribbing lines from old poems, Dante,Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, Goldsmith, Baudelaire, Wagner, Nerval,Augustine and Buddha.He mingles a line from Marvel,say, with snatched overheard conversation or a fragment of stage dialogue to produce an effect as of an orchestra tuning up.He has transformed bits and pieces of cultural scrap into a new broken,dissonant form.

We know Eliot had had a breakdown and had taken leave from work when he wrote The Waste Land. There is a merging of the personal and the political. With Eliot's desire to escape from his personality through detachment in his work, he uses impersonality. The technique where variations of mental state are depicted through various personae and voices is radically experimental. We have a fractured narrative, changing voices and tonal shifts and we cannot identify who the voices are: who `we' `us' or `I' is.Through the indolence of illness he tapped the depths of his subconscious.He emphasises the aural imagination.

We need to remember Eliot is a major dramatic poet,(his most experimental work is Sweeney Agonistes)using dramatic monologue, dramatic meditation, striving to grasp a metaphysical condition that could be called religious in a world that knew nothing of it at a time when Eliot was non-Christian. He draws on the mythical method he admires in Ulysses, but the result is incoherent and messy. We also get voices from the music-hall, like the Victorian novel, a dying form with the rise of cinema, with Eliot doing a `turn'.

What unifies everything is the subtle music of the soul, a passive undriven music of Eliot's best poetry. As Leavis said:" The unity the poem aims at is that of an inclusive consciousness: the organisation it achieves as a work of art is...an organization that may, by analogy, be called musical". Poetry to Eliot approximates to the experience of listening to music. The notes, the intellectual apparatus, the references, the allusions, need to be dropped to appreciate this poem. He said poetry could communicate even before it was understood. Beautiful poem that it is, I tend to believe that Yeats, holding to traditional forms has, in the longer run, in the 20th century, been much more influential.

After the pre-Christian modernist spurt of The Wasteland came the Eliot of the Four Quartets, the High Anglican who believed that the Church was going to lead Europe out of the disruptions and darkness of the Thirties. And then, after hed won the Nobel Prize in 1948, there was a much calmer and more confident Eliot altogether. Prufrock ,his early poem is also a great favorite with some startling imagery and sly humour.This American expatriate took to English poetry and criticism (Sacred Wood,Tradition and the Individual Talent etc.)and cultivated a new kind of innovative spoken poetry.I still think The Wasteland had a greater intensity than
his Christian poetry,once he had found belief.He was the modernist par excellence.

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one of the best ever

with eliot, a maximum of content is achieved through a FORM worked with a
care and conciousness not seen perhaps since the greeks. he understood,
as he once wrote, that the novel form ended with flaubert. in the centuries after picasso and stravinsky there is no place for anything in
literature which makes people remain sitting, whithout standing and perhaps dancing. the same thing could be said about pound, very different though very twin.

nice book

Book in stated condition, great quality with cover sleeve intact. Prompt delivery (~36 hours).

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T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems, 1909-1962

Prompt delivery and best price for new copy, and book in perfect condition. Indispensable
collection of Eliot's complete poetry, without the plays. A beautiful collection of haunting poetry.
So nice to have the poems written after "The Waste Land" as well as all the poems leading up to it.
I am ordering another copy through Berklee College of Music library for reserve for my students of aesthetics.
Wayne Wild

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Delightful addition to our collection!

This a great collection of poems from the past! If you enjoy whimsy, this is for you!

Published two years before his death, this collection includes all of Eliot?s poetry that he wished to preserve.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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