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

by T.S. Eliot

There is no more authoritative collection of the poetry that T.S. Eliot himself wished to preserve than this volume, published two years before his death in 1965.

Poet, dramatist, critic, and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) to Four Quartets (1943), and includes such literary landmarks as 'The Waste Land' and 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Literature, Fiction, 20th Century, American, British Literature

Paperback

First published January 1, 1963

About the author

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot

Reviews

[leynes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Stearns Eliot is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry due to his use of language, writing style, and verse structure which reinvigorated English poetry. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there. He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39 and renounced his American citizenship.

Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" from 1914 to 1915, which, at the time of its publication, was considered outlandish. It was followed by The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1943). He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".

I grew curious of Eliot's poetic work after reading (and becoming obsessed with) Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Through the commentary, I found out that Eliot used the phrase "Mistah Kurtz-he dead." as an epitaph for his now-famous poem "The Hollow Men". I also learned that he was inspired by Conrad's use of the term (and the characterisation of that type of person) in such a way that he chose that term as a title for his poem in which he explored the concept of shallowness in our modern world. I also remembered that Achebe used one of Eliot's lines, from his superb poem "The Journey of the Magi", for his novel No Longer at Ease. So all signs pointed toward reading Eliot myself.

After thinking long and hard between choosing his Selected Poems or his Collected Poems, I decided that I needed the full dosage, especially since his body of work is pretty manageable. For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced relatively few poems. He was aware of this even early in his career; he wrote to J. H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event." With Eliot, we have a clear case of QUALITY over QUANTITY, and that's great. Every poem, every line, is so well thought out, it's truly a blessing!

Eliot's poetry is fairly easy to read, but not necessarily easy to understand. I had no problem getting through the poems because his style and subject matter are very fascinating, however, more often than not I had a hard time figuring out what it all meant, and so I had to defer to other sources (something I love to do!). Eliot's poetic style can be characterised by its disjointed nature, usage of allusion and quotation, abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. I would classify his poems as highbrow, most of all due its intellectual claim and appeal, usage of fancy words, and incorporation of quotes in foreign languages (e.g. Latin, German, Italian etc.). His subject matter speak of alienation, fragmentation, despair and disenchantment and disillusionment (in the post-war period and in general). Eliot himself believed that poetry should be difficult, so it isn't surprising that a first-time reader would have its problems with his work. Nonetheless, I had so much fun with this collection and was amazed by how many quotes have already seared themselves into my brain, I can quote all my favorites by heart!

Eliot's first published poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), is the first poem of this collection and it immediately captivated me. Through the poem, Eliot – aged 27 when he wrote it – communicates visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of ageing and mortality as well as physical and intellectual inertia. You can feel the disillusionment seeping through every line, all the lost opportunities, the negative self-image. It's a lot, but it's very relatable, probably especially to young(er) readers. The most famous line from the poem – "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" – is beyond brilliant but the one that stuck with me the most goes as follows: "I am no prophet – and here's no great matter. / I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, / And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker / And in short, I was afraid." UFF UFF UFF. I HAVE SEEN THE MOMENT OF MY GREATNESS FLICKER. Just holy shit!!!

In his first published collection, we also find the lovely poem "Preludes" (1917) which brought us the chilling "The notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing."

"Gerontion" (1920) (Greek for: old man) is the notable poem from Eliot's second published work. It consists of the interior monologue of an old man which describes Europe after WWI from the perspective of someone who has lived mostly in the 19th century. My favorite line is: "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?"

In 1922, Eliot wrote his most famous (?) poem: "The Waste Land". It was composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot—his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders. Before the poem's publication as a book in December 1922, Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair. The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. Dismissing this view, Eliot commented in 1931, "When I wrote a poem called The Waste Land, some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed 'the disillusion of a generation', which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention."

The poem's epitaph (chosen with the help of Ezra Pound who advocated against using "The horror! The horror!" from Conrad's Heart of Darkness – BOO TOMATOES, TOMATOES) reads: " With my own eyes, I saw the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a bottle, and when the attendants asked her what she wanted, she replied, 'I want to die.'" Pretty great as well, huh? I literally want to scream. No one conveys despair as well as Eliot does. He literally makes me wanna yeet myself off a cliff.

The poem opens with the description of spring as something to be dreaded (spring, of course, symbolises life): "April is the cruellest month..." The narrator is trapped in static existence between life and death. The typical themes of alienation, fragmentation and disenchantment are on the forefront in this poem. The one line I'll never recover from goes as follows: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." This line conveys the fleeting and ephemeral nature of human existence; with the "handful of dust" symbolising our body's frail state and what we'll eventually all turn into. I WANNA SCREAM FROM THE TOP OF MY LUNGS RIGHT NOW!!

In the poem, Eliot describes London as Dante's hell with its inhabitants being trapped in a deathlike state following a meaningless routine day in day out. It's bleak, ya'll! In the last lines, we find another iconic phrase: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins" which is beyond beautiful and suggests that it is possible to create art in the face of madness. The poem ends with the Sanskrit word "Shantih" which means inner peace/ peace of mind and refers to a deliberate state of psychological or spiritual calm despite the potential presence of stressors.

"The Hollow Men" (1925) (one of my favorite poems) features as epitaph a quote from Conrad's Heart of Darkness and ends with the banger line: "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."

"The Journey of the Magi" (1927) is probably the biggest surprise of the entire collection. I loved it so much. Through the poem, Eliot retells the story of the Biblical magi who travelled to Bethlehem to visit the new born Jesus as told in the Gospel of Matthew. After their return, the magi express themes of alienation, regret and a feeling of powerlessness in a world that has turned upside down. Chinua Achebe used the last lines – "We returned to our places, these Kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation, / With an alien people clutching their gods. / I would be glad of another death." – as epitaph for his novel No Longer Ease to show the parallels between the wise men's feelings of alienation from their homeland after what they have seen in Bethlehem and the same feelings of Obi Okonkwo, the main character of Achebe's novel, who has just returned to Nigeria after years of study in England.

What I found most interesting about the poem is that it can be interpreted in quite the Christianity-critical way. On their way to Bethlehem, the magi wonders: "With the voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly." And when he says in the end that he would be "glad of another death", he speaks about his own death. The magi wants to die because he no longer has a purpose on this Earth/ in his homeland after the birth of Jesus Christ, since the magi's old world died and was replaced by the Christian world with its Christian values and viewpoints. The Birth of Jesus was a Death. THE END IS THE BEGINNING, YA’LL. AND THE BEGINNING IS THE END. This is the essence of life that Eliot distilled through his poetry. It’s a theme he would perfect in his Four Quartets (more on that later).

The reason why I didn't vibe with the whole collection is the religious shift that takes place towards the middle of it. On 29 June 1927, Eliot converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism. He specifically identified as Anglo-Catholic, proclaiming himself "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion". After his conversion, Eliot's poetic style became less ironic, and the poems were no longer populated by multiple characters in dialogue. Eliot's subject matter also became more focused on his spiritual concerns and his Christian faith.

"Ash-Wednesday" is the first long poem written by Eliot after his conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when a person who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation.

In "Choruses from the Rock", Eliot writes: "For a man / without GOD is a seed upon the wind: driven this way / and that, and finding no place of lodgement and / germination." And I think that might be the crux of why I don't vibe with Eliot, the religious man, as much as I did with young Eliot, the lost and disillusioned man: I can no longer relate to him. In most of his religious poetry, Eliot gives off the vibe that he has finally understood everything, he has found his place in "God's great kingdom" (he literally had his COME TO JESUS MOMENT). He has figured it out. And call it envy or disbelief, but I can't relate to this. Besides, I don't like being preached to. "Choruses from the Rock" also brought us this beautiful line: "There is no life that is not in community,".

A notable exception are his Four Quartets; among the last poems he wrote, Eliot considered this his "masterpiece". This is also the work that most of all led him to being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, so it seems like the world agrees. This work consists of four long poems, each first published separately: "Burnt Norton" (1936), "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941) and "Little Gidding" (1942). Although they resist easy characterisation, each poem includes meditations on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation to the human condition.

The notion that the end is the beginning and the beginning the end, first pointed out in "The Journey of the Magi" and "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees" ("Which shall be also a great fear, as on the occasion / When fear came upon every soul: / Because the beginning shall remind us of the end / And the first coming of the second coming."), is perfected in Eliot's Four Quartets. One of its epitaphs reads: "The way upward and the way downward is one and the same." Four Quartets is about the riddle that is time. We humans have this deep-seated hunch that we are made for eternity—yet we will turn into dust.

The first quartet starts as follows: "Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past." Your end/ destiny is in your beginning, and your beginning is in your end. In the moment of your birth/ beginning your death/ end is already contained, it is inevitable; and in your death a new beginning (at least, if you're Christian and believe in life after death/ heaven and hell and what not) is also predestined. This is the pure belief that Eliot wanted to convey with his last great work.

"East Coker", the second quartet, refers to a little town to which Eliot traced his ancestry. His ashes now lay in a Church there, with the epigraph being the last line of that quartet: "In my end is my beginning." (DO YOU HEAR ME SCREAM??? I so hope he found the peace he was looking for. <3)

In "Little Gidding", the last quartet, we find an allusion to his famous "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." from "The Waste Land": "Dust in the air suspended / Marks the place where a story ended." (HOW BEAUTIFUL IS THAT?) We also find this beautiful summation of his work: "Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph."

Since literature is a cycle, what comes next? What are the works that reading Eliot's poetry has inspired me to pick up? The Jew of Malta from Christopher Marlowe (Eliot often used this play for his epitaphs), the poems of Ezra Pound (Eliot’s friend and mentor… and biggest cheerleader), Les Fleurs du Mal (duh)… and *drum roll please* The Bible (yeah, that won’t happen for a loooong time but it’s one the list now, who would've thought).

All in all, I enjoy Eliot's poetry pre-Anglo-Catholic conversion more than his later more overt religious stuff but man, he's a great poetry, there's no denying that. In a wonderful lecture, Professor Emeritus Thomas Howard, defines poetry as "the supreme attempt to purify, concentrate and distill language". He uses the analogy of the bunsen burner: we don't want a bonfire, we want a targeted and concise flame. Eliot achieves precisely that through his words. He is a poet in the truest sense of the word. Living through two world wars fully conscious must've been beyond tough, and to create art in the face of it even tougher. He rolled the rock up the mountain, and by some curious magic, managed to make it stay there. His poetry is for forever.

[Roy Lotz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like many people, I first came across Eliot’s poetry in university, where it was used as an example of hyper-intellectual, highly difficult Literature that any educated person must at least pretend to appreciate. Yet as Eliot himself says in one of his essays of literary criticism, thinking a poem is ‘difficult’ puts one in a frame of mind inconducive to appreciating poetry. It becomes a challenge, an intellectual game, a homework assignment—not a work of art. This time around, therefore, I was determined to read these poems for pleasure first and foremost, and let whatever deeper meaning they possessed seep into me (or, more likely, go soaring over my head).

With some poems, this is easy enough. The first poem in this collection is among my favorites of all time: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” I like virtually everything about it. The poem is unabashedly modernist—with its sharp pivots, its elisions of meaning, its many references—and the language is correspondingly modern. Yet Eliot retains enough of the trappings of traditional verse so that the poem is quite readable and, indeed, linguistically lovely in its odd way. On top of all that, the balding, aging Prufrock—with his unasked and unanswerable question, his vague sense of dissatisfaction and discontent—is a character I can (unfortunately) identify with. Every year I become more Prufrockian.

Skipping over the minor poems, many of them nice enough, we get to the next milestone “The Waste Land.” This is where Eliot lost me back in my college days, and I am afraid I did not fare much better this time around. Anyone can notice that it is a daring, innovative poem; and if you have a basic knowledge of history and literature, you can appreciate how such a poem captured a certain moment and feeling. But simply as a poem—a series of words one reads to savor and enjoy—I just find it too difficult a morsel to chew. There are some forms of confusion that can be aesthetically successful—a disquieting sense of the ground shifting beneath your feet—yet with this poem I find myself simply baffled, my eyes glazing over.

This is not true of the major poems of Eliot’s late phase: the Four Quartets. By this time Eliot was in his fifties, had converted to Christianity, and was a respected critic and playwright. Compared to his earlier works, the four poems have a kind of straightforward, prose-like tone. Instead of playing with words, here he is playing with ideas—the result often reading like versified metaphysics. This was more my speed, I suppose, and I found myself fascinated by these four poems. I even started to wonder whether this old poet might be incredibly profound after all:

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.

All told, though it is easy to like and admire Eliot, it is difficult to love him. His poetry is dense, difficult, and cerebral. Fascinated by tradition, Eliot’s poems seem to emanate from impersonal, purely literary impulses—the only genuine emotion being a kind of conservative distaste for the modern world. The result is poetry that is brilliant but ultimately cold. Eliot’s poetry was written in his study and is meant to be read in yours. After reading too much of him, one longs for something wild—something with at least a touch of passion—poetry that can be read on a mountain as well as at your desk. Still, I am glad to have spent some time with Eliot. His poetry is a genuine education.

[Eliza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Eliot was a phenomenal poet. What lovely writing!

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd previously only read Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which, as good as it was, was solely about cats, so this collection was the first time that I truly immersed myself in a wider range of his poems, and what a collection it turned out to be!

And while I admired his earlier work in this book including 'Prufrock And Other Observations',
'The Waste Land', and 'The Hollow Men', I was particularly struck on the poems that made up the 'Four Quartets' - Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, of which I ended up reading again, and then again. Most of the longer poems turned out to be the most impressive, but I added below one of my favourite shorter verses 'A Dedication to my Wife', which was came right at the end of this sublime collection.

To whom I owe the leaping delight
That quickens my senses in our wakingtime
And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime,
The breathing in unison

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech
And babble the same speech without need of meaning.

No peevish winter wind shall chill
No sullen tropic sun shall wither
The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only

But this dedication is for others to read:
These are private words addressed to you in public.

[Ulysse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Centoquattro

There was a man called T.S. Eliot
Whom I met long ago at the Marriott
He was eloquent on doom
So we went back to his room
And indulged in some hot tea and crumpets

A sinistra... / A destra...


.

[Prerna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sue me. I think T S Eliot was a petulant whiner. Go ahead, call me a philistine. Because the truth is, I hated this collection. This is a huge confession for me because I've obsessed over T S Eliot's writing all my life. During my undergrad days, I often read his poetry for comfort and joyously thought "dude gets it." I was convinced that no person, alive or dead, could ever articulate the essence of the gruelling modern human condition better than T S Eliot. But now I'm in my mid-twenties and I've seen too many things, especially in the past two years, and I'm so done with lamentations for lost 'meaning.'

The only reason I'm giving this book three stars is because I understand its literary merit and because I've enjoyed many of these poems individually at various phases of my life. But when I read all of them collectively, I could no longer deny that this was mostly an old, privileged man complaining about life, loss of spirituality (whatever that means), modernity and change.

I think what bothered me the most was the fact that Eliot seemed to bestow people with an agency that we don't really possess - he seems to be of the opinion that as a species, we are entirely capable of attaining spiritual enlightenment (again, whatever that means) but choose not to simply because we are lazy. Ugh.

Eliot is a master of metaphor and therefore, by extension, a master of language. His ingenuity shines through in his use of poetical forms, references to eclectic texts and of course in his use of words as mere tools to associate disparate ideas seamlessly. I only wish he wouldn't whine so much.

[Szplug · Rating 5 out of 5]

That's all the facts, when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
I've been born and once is enough.
You don't remember, but I remember,
Once is enough.

Well here again that don't apply
But I've gotta use words when I talk to you

When you're alone like he was alone
You're either or neither
I tell you again it don't apply
Death or life or life or death
Death is life and life is death
I gotta use words when I talk to you
But if you understand or if you don't
That's nothing to me and nothing to you.

I always find it curious how much Eliot—quite conservative in character and anxious about what he regarded as a modern cultural evolutionary tendency, abetted by the dry rationalism of an increasingly technical society, towards pressing everything downwards unto the lowermost tier of the coarse, the vulgar, the profane, the commonplace—embraced a modernist grasp of language, with all of its form-fluid possibilities and permutations, in order to work his utterly unique manner of lyrical genius. And it is genius, at the very least by any aesthetic measure; combining words into lines and phrases that leap off of the page in all of their graceful poignancy and grab the reader by the soul, pierce the superficial layers of the memory to embed themselves within the selfsame chambers that house such perduring residents as the framed vista of supernally brilliant swathes of colour that suffused with flowering existence a memorable, cloud-garbed sunset; mayhap an instant when, flush with the harmonious pressure of musical gales, impaled and frozen upon a hook sonically plunged in an arc through the soul, your breath seized-up in a drawn interval balancing between the explosion and implosion of life; or perhaps the roseate, winsome, heart-punching smile of a youthful beauty that captured the entirety of your pubescent heart and cranked the inner thermostat to fluttering scorch; or even the first moment when, still as a statue in the midst of a world in constant motion, that sense of limpid, fulsome connexion with the cosmos in its entirety—with its subtle divine pressure to drive you down upon your knees—hummed through every fiber of your being with a tellurian energy ultimately derived from cosmogonic fuel of the most primordial lineage. And when you can, through the application of diligent reasoning and intuitive sleuthing, discern the implicit meaning behind the elegantly moving textual façade, you realize that Eliot truly belongs in that first-tier of twentieth century poets, masterfully forging personal commiserations by means of linguistic elements invariably held at somewhat of a remove—the better to penetrate the obfuscations of an age engaged in the shedding and shoring-up of beliefs—that it might seize and squeeze your spiritual nuts. An early favourite of mine, and this collection contains one marvel after another from the lengthy span of his versified creativity.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's weird. I'm pretty sure I dislike reading T.S. Eliot's poetry. I was trying to find some words to explain this, and here's what I came up with. They remind me of the monuments in good old Washington DC. The first time you see them, there they are, all towering stone and wrought figures, some very human, some quite abstract representational polygons, full of whatever amount of symbolic subtext. Mighty. Intimidating. White. Symmetrical. Immovable. Seemingly there from the outset of time, meaning all of these things that they will forever embody. Important things. But if you live here, if you see them often enough, they just kind of start feeling... monumental, and monumental only. That is massive, imposing, built to last, with all that historical significance. But in many ways dull, never-changing, never showing new sides or varying interiors. The interiors are always the same with every visit. Lincoln's bearded visage over time starts to become a pretty tedious stone representation of Lincoln's bearded visage. After a little more time, the monuments become background and are incapable of being seen at all, and then when you do revisit them, to try to see them again, they evoke very little in terms of inspiration or feeling. Then what are they but artfully arranged stones? That's how I think of Eliot's poems, even the best ones, which in my opinion are The Hollow Men and The Four Quartets. I understand their formal perfection. I understand their magisterial harmony. But I can't come back to them and keep digging things out of them with pleasure. After awhile they aren't elusive. Once their secrets are disclosed they immediately enter stasis. I think Frank O'Hara is a better poet than T.S. Eliot. I expect this will enrage a few people. But O'Hara's work possesses elements that I find fundamentally lacking in Eliot's: humorous melancholy, strange language that manages to stay alive beyond multiple readings, amateurishness (which is important), willingness to sound ridiculous, or even superfluous at times, in the search of the oblique sentiment that is inexactly, perfectly human. There is nothing superfluous in Eliot, and that is a flaw. O'Hara produced thousands of poems, on lunch breaks, on the subway, on walks, on napkins at restaurants, on postcards, probably on toilet paper. When I think of Eliot writing I think of him in a three-piece suit seated at a mahogany desk with a candle burning! And I am fully aware that he lived in an era of abundant electrical lighting! This is a problem. Eliot is for the universities, and we needed him to exist, if for nothing else to write "The Wasteland" when the world needed "The Wasteland". But it's O'Hara's collected poems I keep by the bedside.

[Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great addition to any shelf that wants or needs an Eliot collection!

[Shankar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am still in the honeymoon stage of my relationship with poetry. Literally trying to get a handle on its appreciation and being able to truly understand it.

Despite my "greenhorn"ness I think I will be reasonably correct to state this as a wonderful piece of work. Each poem in this repository has annotations which may need additional reading to grasp the import.

The poems The Hollow Men and the Lines for Curcuscaraway and Mirza Murad Ali Beg stood out to me as amongst the best given my lack of knowledge on many of references in other poems to historical and literary works. I will definitely re-read this.

Recommended

[Peycho Kanev · Rating 5 out of 5]

Critics of Eliot damn his work for its difficulties - and one cannot deny that its complicated diversions into technical and structural experimentation, mythical reference and multilingual commentary do initially intimidate. The beauty of Eliot's poetry is that it grows with you. 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). 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) and one of his volumes of critical essays.

[Ṣafā · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best poem collection I've ever read. After I was done reading it I was telling my mother, "It kills me. It kills me."

T.S. Eliot paints a picture so vivid you can't help but see it, it forms on its own, it penetrates your soul, it speaks to your mind, it fills your eyes. Eliot is what a poet ought to be, the complete embodiment. He reaches deep into you and pulls on your heart strings. He shows you what poetry can be, what it can do, how high it can reach.

I just loved every, really every, bit of this book and I know for sure I want to read it again. Actually, I was a little melancholic reaching the end and I felt like I wanted to read more. It is a great great piece of art and if you haven't read Eliot, you don't know what you're missing.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

When one reads a poet’s collected works not over a season but over decades, the poet stops being a distant literary figure and becomes an intimate presence in one’s inner life. My own relationship with T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, 1909–1962, began in 2001, when I approached “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” with that mixture of curiosity and mild intimidation that the label “modernist classic” tends to provoke.

Back then it felt like deciphering an encrypted code. Over the years, and many re-readings later, that difficulty has revealed itself not as obscurity for its own sake but as a deliberate, exacting way of compressing intellect, emotion, and history into language.

This collection, published two years before Eliot’s death, is effectively the canon he chose to preserve, a carefully ordered body of work that moves from the hesitant ironies of Prufrock and Other Observations through the shattered mosaic of The Waste Land, the devotional complexity of Ash-Wednesday, the meditative unity of Four Quartets, and even the odd detour into feline whimsy with Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

The early poems, above all “Prufrock”, made their mark as an unmistakable break from the lingering Romantic sensibility of the late nineteenth century.

Where a Keats or Shelley might have given us the evening sky as a romantic tableau, Eliot gives us an evening “spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table”, a simile that shocks the reader into recognising the disenchanted, urban modernity in which the poem lives.

The kinship here is with Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, another anatomist of city life, though their sensibilities diverge sharply: Baudelaire leans into the sensual corruption of the streets; Prufrock measures out his life with coffee spoons, his pleasures muted, his movements hesitant. In this sense, Eliot’s modern persona resembles the masks and heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa, embodying the inner division of the modern self — yearning and fearful at once.

Then comes The Waste Land, still the most dissected single poem in twentieth-century English literature. Its famously subversive opening — “April is the cruellest month” — inverts Chaucer’s springtime renewal into a season of unwelcome awakening.

This post-First World War collage of voices and languages is the fractured mirror of a civilisation unsure of its continuity. Here, comparisons with Ezra Pound’s Cantos are inevitable. Pound, who famously edited The Waste Land into its precise form, pursued a similarly vast cultural synthesis through fragmentation; but where Pound’s sequence sprawls into an open-ended labyrinth, Eliot’s architecture is exact, every shard placed to carry structural weight.

The tone, ritualistic and incantatory, also recalls Constantine Cavafy’s use of history as a living echo chamber, though Cavafy’s voice is more conversational and slyly ironic, where Eliot’s is solemn.

Contrast this with Rabindranath Tagore, who in his own responses to modernity retains a foundational faith in the harmony of the human and the divine — an element absent from the bleak cultural landscape of The Waste Land. In spirit, Eliot’s vision here is closer to Paul Valéry’s Le Cimetière marin, recognising beauty yet holding it in the grip of intellectual mortality.

By 1930, with Ash Wednesday, the voice has shifted. Eliot’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism infuses the work with the rhythms and repetitions of liturgy. Lines like “Because I do not hope to turn again” move with a ritual cadence, the diction shaped by both mystical aspiration and the dry, desert imagery of spiritual trial.

His devotional poetry invites comparison to George Herbert and John Donne, whose metaphysical rigour intertwines with prayer, but Eliot keeps more of modernism’s ambiguity — the faith here is hard-won, never free of the shadows of doubt.

One can set this alongside Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where the poet wrestles with the divine as much as longs for it. Yet where Rilke leans toward aesthetic and spiritual openness, Eliot leans toward renunciation, toward the narrowing of vision into focus.

In Four Quartets, written between 1935 and 1943, Eliot achieves something like the unified vision he had been approaching all along. If The Waste Land is a cathedral built of fragments, Four Quartets is a completed church. “The still point of the turning world” stands among the most resonant phrases in modern poetry, combining philosophical abstraction with sensory immediacy.

Here, Dante’s Paradiso feels like the closest predecessor, not in doctrine but in the integration of personal vision and cosmic order. At the same time, the poems draw on Eastern thought, especially the Bhagavad Gita, for their meditations on time and detachment.

The impulse to bind the scattered elements of experience into a single contemplative structure recalls Pablo Neruda’s Canto General, another late-career summation, though Neruda’s unifying principle is rooted in the historical and political landscape of Latin America, not in metaphysical eternity. Yeats, too, is a useful counterpoint: in The Tower and Last Poems, he is obsessed with the cycles of time, with ageing, with permanence; but his tone burns with symbolic grandeur, where Eliot’s offers the quiet authority of acceptance.

Then, almost as if to remind us that seriousness does not preclude play, the Collected Poems also includes Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. These light verses, later immortalised on stage, show a deftness with rhythm and character reminiscent of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.

In tone, they also recall W.H. Auden’s lighter work — playful on the surface, but written with an ear so precise that the frivolity itself becomes a kind of craft. For readers who have lived with Eliot’s weightier works, these poems offer a reprieve: proof that even a poet of such deliberate austerity could loosen his tie and chase a cat’s tail for the pleasure of it.

Over two decades of reading, certain strengths emerge with particular clarity. Eliot possesses an almost architectural control over his materials, whether assembling the deliberate chaos of The Waste Land or the serene symmetry of Four Quartets.

His cultural reach is vast, moving fluently between East and West, ancient and modern, sacred and profane. His sense of musicality — the rhythms, the refrains, the sonorous phrasing — gives his verse the memorability of chant.

And his intellectual depth assumes a reader willing to think as hard as they feel. Yet these same qualities reveal his limitations. Compared to Neruda’s lush sensuality or Tagore’s human warmth, Eliot can seem emotionally reserved, even cold.

The natural world rarely appears as an unmediated source of delight, and bodily life seldom receives the celebratory attention it gets in Whitman or Akhmatova. His elitist cultural stance — guarding a canon against the disorder of modernity — can also feel constraining in an era that prizes multiplicity and inclusiveness.

Living with Eliot’s poems over decades changes the way one hears them. In 2001, “Prufrock” felt like a locked door.

Years later, I can walk its corridors without switching on every explanatory footnote; I hear the shifting registers, the sly humour in the hesitations, and the ache behind the irony. Certain lines have lodged themselves so deeply that they surface unbidden: “In my end is my beginning” at the close of a life chapter, “The communication of the dead is tongued with fire” in moments of grief.

This is what happens with the rare poets we read across a lifetime — Dante, whose Commedia reveals more with each ascent; Rilke, whose Sonnets to Orpheus seem to reshape themselves as we age; Tagore, whose Gitanjali deepens in tandem with our own love and loss. Eliot belongs in this company not because he speaks to every reader at every moment, but because his work contains enough structural and emotional resonance to remain a source of discovery over decades.

In the shifting landscape of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry — with movements toward the confessional, the political, and the experimental — Eliot’s Collected Poems remains a central axis. His modernist innovations in form and intertextual method still influence how we think about poetic structure, cultural inheritance, and the balance between fragmentation and unity.

Placing him alongside Dante, Baudelaire, Yeats, Rilke, Neruda, and Tagore sharpens our sense of his singularity: he is not the poet of unmediated emotion or democratic sweep; he is the poet of measured revelation, the craftsman of stillness within the whirl.

For readers willing to meet him at his level of demand, this collection offers something enduring — poetry as demanding as philosophy, as precise as architecture, and as haunting as memory itself.

[Circe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eliot’s fragmentary texts are beautiful; lush in a brilliant, burning way, with lines such as ‘Ash on an old man’s sleeve / Is all the ash the burnt roses leave’ proving his lyrical gift for making music with words. It’s as Eliot himself describes in part V of ‘Little Gidding’:

‘And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together).’

I purchased more of Eliot after finishing his delightful ‘Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats’ and finding it quite heartwarming. I was fortunate enough to discover this book not long after, and have thoroughly enjoyed each moment spent with it. I imagine it’ll be one of those poetry books I always rummage about for on ill, uninspiring days, or days when I’m just in need for a good ‘mellow’. My favourites are compacted with both new and old; I discovered little gems here and there, but works such as ‘The Hollow Men’ have always been a favourite of mine for years. Eliot treasures from this book include: ‘La Figlia Che Piange,’ the tragically unfinished ‘Sweeney Agonistes,’ ‘Little Gidding,’ ‘A Note on War Poetry,’ the short ‘Death by Water,’ and ‘To Walter de la Mare;’ a tribute to another of my favourite poets.

“The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.”

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've spent my life reading Eliot. When I was a high school junior I had a teacher who turned me on to poetry. She showed me the truth in Sandburg, but I soon discovered Eliot on my own. A story I still love to tell is how I spent the summer of my 17th year walking around with a library copy of Eliot's poems under my arm. A cousin asked me, "You're not reading that stuff, are you?" Well, I was and still am.

My copy of Collected Poems was the second hardcover book I ever bought, after Sandburg's Collected Poems. Eliot has followed the arc of a man's reading life. A sun moving through a sky. From the boy walking summer with Eliot tucked under his arm to the much older man still reading for the umpteenth time, that volume now full of notes and underlinings indicating an understanding if not quite yet the understanding. I'll keep coming back because I'll never be able to complete that understanding. Conrad Aiken famously said of The Waste Land that it succeeds because of its ambiguities. I think that's true. I think that each reader gets his own meaning from Eliot because he wrote the poetry everyone needs. Sooner of later you come to it. I know he gave me something I could carry with me my whole life. It's lasted that long.

As long as he can set me vibrating like a tuning fork I'll never become insensitive to his poetry. His work is comfort. It's the honey made in season that you have to taste and taste.

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I love some of the poems, others I didn't care for at all. So it is hard to rate the book as a whole... These poems were selected by Eliot himself just a few years before he died as the best of his work and it certainly contains all of his most famous work EXCEPT for the fact it doesn't even have one poem from "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats". With that in mind, I cannot whole-heartedly recommend it as a single sole volume of Eliot's poetry.

I am not much of a modernist, so it is perhaps not surprising that I found many of the so-called "minor poems" more enjoyable than the more serious (and to me often more obscure) verses. My favorites:

- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
- Portrait of a Lady
- The Waste Land (reviewed separately)
- Ahe-Wednesday V (If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent)
- Five-finger Exercises (esp. I Lines to a Persian Cat)
- Landscapes (esp. V Cape Ann)
- Burnt Norton from Four Quartets
- To the Indians Who Died in Africa

[Georgia Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate T.S. Eliot as a influential and significant writer of classic literature. However, I find it difficult to understand the truest meaning of his words. Truthfully that is a fault of mine, but poetry has never been something I am drawn to. In saying that, I'm willing to look deeper into his poetry to better understand it.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Way too much here for a real review, but I had to write something about the volume that's been my tattered, marked-up, much-loved companion for twelve years now. I feel Eliot's ache for transcendence, his paralyzing frustration at the limitations of language to communicate the depths of our souls. And yet he did it better than anyone ever has. It's intellectual, yes, but it's from an intellectual perpetually pushing across into the visceral, never quite unifying it all fully, and knowing that the action itself, not the getting there, is the blessing.

Less floridly, in general the most famous stuff is the best. The Four Quartets are my favorite poem(s) of all time, and Ash-Wednesday is nearly as good. (For some reason The Waste Land has never resonated deeply with me except in parts, though.)

[trestitia ⵊⵊⵊ deamorski]

neden canım eliot çevrilmiyor bu memlekette?

demiştim, allaha şükür everestten geldi.

[Bea]

no i did not read all of the poems in this collection but i may as well have done considering how long it took me to read the ones i did… personally this was a mixed bag but i did like ash-wednesday

[Brent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Early Eliot is almost too good to be surpassed: J. Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady, Mr. Apollinax, &c. Then one reads late Eliot (Choruses from the Rock, Four Quarters), and one is blown away by the simplicity, potency, and spiritual dynamism that Eliot harnesses in verse.

The Waste Land and The Hollow Men are classics for a reason. My favorite poem of this authorized (by Eliot himself) collection is "Choruses from the Rock" which captures the spiritual depravity, hollowness, and vacancy of modern society, cloaked in big cities, heavy pollution, and commerce.

I often times wonder what men of yesteryear would say if they were alive today. It is all the more better, rather, to feel the weight, the mantle, that must be taken up by men and women of our generation. We need new Eliots as seers, prophets, and poets, to pierce through the cultural morass, vapidity, and spiritual bankruptcy and shew man the way back to Eden.

"A man's destination is not his destiny" (To the Indians Who Died in Africa).

"Yet nothing is impossible, nothing,
To men of faith and conviction.
Let us therefore make perfect our will.
O GOD, help us."
(Choruses from the Rock, VIII)

"What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of God."
(Choruses from the Rock, II)

"Though you forget the way to the Temple.
There is one who remembers the way to your door:
Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
You shall not deny the Stranger."
(Choruses from the Rock, III)

[Rodrigo de Meneses · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my beginning is my end (Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.) Ou: This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper. Ou: I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter; / I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, / And I have seem the eternal Footman hold my cold, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid. Ou: Let us take the air in a tobacco trance. Ou: I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Ou: Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season. Ou: Unreal city. Ou: Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night. Ou: Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, / Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. Ou: My people humble people who expect / Nothing. Ou: O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, / Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. Ou: With a little patience. Ou: For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. Ou: Because I do not hope do turn again.

Mas, também: Although I do not hope to turn again. E: Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it’ / Let us go and make our visit. [depois relembro outros, vou ter que me levantar, agora.]

[the passion according to t.h · Rating 4 out of 5]

Incredibly delicate poetry:

Children’s voices in the orchard
Between the blossom- and the fruit-time:
Golden head, crimson head,
Between the green tip and the root.
Black wing, brown wing, hover over;
Twenty years and the spring is over;
To-day grieves, to-morrow grieves,
Cover me over, light-in-leaves;
Golden head, black wing,
Cling, swing,
Spring, sing,
Swing up into the apple-tree.

[John Hughes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eliot was certainly a profound thinker and poet. This father and Fabre edition is the perfect introduction to his poetry, opening with the more raw Eliot of Prufrock through his sculpting as an artist with The Hollow Men, The Wasteland, Ash Wednesday, Choruses from the Rock and Four Quartets.

Hollow Men remains the most solidified poetic experience that Eliot can give. Though I enjoyed Choruses from the Rock and Ash Wednesday immensely.

I read this quickly after Ezra Pound’s Personae, and, if push came to shove, I would side with Pound being the better poet. Eliot is still in modernity, half recoiling in horror, half looking upward for salvation. Pound has already left - his salvation arrived in Greece.

[Jack Alexander Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

What more do you need to know, other than that this is a comprehensive chronological presentation of Eliot's work.

This has all of Eliot's most famous pieces from all stages of his career: Lovesong of J.Alfred Prufock, The Wasteland, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets.

Alongside these titans of 20th century poetry are plenty of fantastic, deeper cuts that are well worth reading.

If you want a primer on Modernist poetry but don't feel like tackling the 116 cantos of Pound (I dont blame you) then this is perfect.

The only famous Eliot pieces you wont find are those in Old Possums Book of Practical Cats.

[Bob Jacobs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wat een dichter. 'The Waste Land' en 'The Hollow Men' zijn tercht absolute klassiekers.

" Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω" (The Waste Land)

Ook al komt de quote oorspronkelijk van Petronius: ijzingwekkend, en dan is het gedicht eigenlijk nog niet begonnen.

"We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar "

(The Hollow men")

Ook hier slechts een klein fragment dat meteen de toon zet.

Lezen!

[Jay Green · Rating 1 out of 5]

Having studied The Wasteland and Prufrock for A level English 40 years ago, I returned to Eliot on a whim to remind myself of the experience. Ugh. I did not realise there was so much in his work that was worse. Dull, repetitive, pretentious, parochial, smug. There is an unmistakable tone here, which one still finds online among high-modernist pro-Tridentine Mass Catholic fascists, of arrogance and untouchability. I rarely chuck books in the bin but will make an exception in the case of this emperor.

[gacer · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Bir çift hırpani kıskaç olmalıydım ben
Suskun denizlerin dibinde seğirten.”

“Oysa bizim gibilere kuru kaburgalar arasında eşinmek düşer.
Metafiziğimizi sıcak tutmak uğruna.”

[Maja Reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

“You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands”

“Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel's consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.
According to thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints' stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart, Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let thy servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.”

[Amélie Amer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the ones in the Norton and I absolutely adored them!
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has to be my favourite.
‘To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.’
‘For I have known them all already, known them all- Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;’ This poem almost read like spoken word. He explored the postwar realm of emptinesses (especially with The Hollow Men) and his own spiritual journey. I loved loved loved it :)))