The Poems of T. S. Eliot: Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems

by T.S. Eliot, Christopher Ricks (Editor), Jim McCue (Editor)

The authoritative edition of one of our greatest poets.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Classic Literature, Nonfiction, Reference, Literature

1344 pages, Paperback

Published December 4, 2018

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

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not sure if this is a reread or not. I've certainly read all of Eliot's poetry. I have a heavily-annotated copy of Collected Poems 1909-1962 that I've been reading for years and a battered paperback of Four Quartets I sometimes carry around with me.

"In my beginning is my end," Eliot wrote in "East Coker." I like to tell the story of how when I was 17 an inspirational English teacher made resistant me sit before her and read Carl Sandburg's "Fog." In a blinding moment of realization I saw meaning and metaphor, and I was in love. I spent my 17th summer walking around with Sandburg and Eliot under my arm, reading intensely. "You're not reading that stuff, are you?" Jerry Stewart asked me. But I was.

I've been reading Eliot ever since. I've come to some understanding but not what I'd consider complete or even satisfactory. And that's the attraction of this edition: the opportunity to learn more because behind the 346 pages of the collected and uncollected poems are 879 (!) pages of commentary. So I've started reading in the middle of the volume, at p355, knowing I'll soon come to commentary which will take me back to my beginning and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which is also the current end of reading which began when I was 17.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inexhaustible ferocity. Eliot denies the contemporaneous rejection of rhyme and meter as a decadent vestige of bygone poetry and, instead, reconfigures prosody onto prosaic form. You read "Burnt Norton" and realize that much of what Eliot writes can be conceived as sentences, as prose, and yet his language burns and burns and burns until language becomes a problematized clarification of itself: quotes recontextualize, the past/present/future of English blooms, and beauty of pre-20th century poetry meets the jagged brittleness of post-symbolist catastrophe. His whole career is dominated by a sense of genius, of an oracle recognizing the crises and dreams of his era and beyond. Reading "Four Quartets" astonishes me. So much of it reads as if Eliot sees us. It is as if he is alongside us, bearing witness to climate apocalypse, to our inability to overcome the collisions of temporality. Unabashedly some of the greatest work ever produced in the English language. It moves you so. It's a body of work that aches with curiosity, autoanalysis, and a pining for a culture to escape decline. Prufrock/The Wasteland/Four Quartets are the bare essentials, but much of the rest does not disappoint.

[Carlos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Los Cuatro Cuartetos son una obra poética de gran calado, llena de meditaciones profundamente intelectuales -filosóficas, literarias y religiosas- con una notable intertextualidad con obras como la Comedia de Dante, los escritos de Heráclito y las Confesiones de San Agustín. Es notable la variedad de técnicas compositivas que se encuentran en los Cuatro Cuartetos, desde pasajes que son prácticamente prosa, a otros más líricos y sujetos a las formas poéticas.

Selección de una edición para la lectura

Sobre la edición elegida para la lectura y objeto de esta reseña, que es el grueso volumen 1 (en inglés) de los poemas completos de Eliot publicados por Faber and Faber en 2015, considero que se trata de una muy buena opción no sólo para acceder a la obra poética de Eliot, sino a un cuerpo muy trabajado de notas que recojen datos, cartas y citas del propio Eliot y otros autores y personas de su entorno. Estas notas tienen la virtud de no contener reflexiones interpretativas y especulativas de los editores acerca de la obra de Eliot. A pesar de ser muy abundantes y pormenorizadas y estar estructuradas de manera algo compleja como para ser leídas de corrido, las notas son una fuente autorizada de información como pocas para una consulta puntual durante o después de la lectura de Eliot.

Como parte de este "proyecto de lectura", decidí abordar también la traducción completa de los Cuatro Cuartetos del inglés (la traducción es una forma especialmente intensa y efectiva de lectura), contrastando mi traducción con la de José María Valverde y con la poco fiel y bastante excéntrica de Andreu Jaume, ediciones que comentaré un poco más abajo. A diferencia del trabajo intenso de lectura realizado con los cuartetos, solo he "catado" en esta ocasión otras obras de Eliot, como "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" (1917), los coros en verso de la obrita teatral The Rock (1934) y la obra teatral de más embergadura Murder in the Cathedral (1935); pero lo poco leído me invita poderosamente a volver a estas obras más adelante y abordar su lectura detallada.

Recursos adicionales

Apoyé la lectura de los Cuatro Cuartetos en inglés con traducciones al español, con al menos un libro de comentarios generales y con una grabación de Audible, tal como detallo y comento a continuación:

1. Eliot, T.S., Cuatro Cuartetos. La roca y Asesinato en la catedral, Lumen, 2016. Trad.Andreu Jaume (ver aquí): una traducción muy currada, pero aun así estrafalaria, acompañada con un estudio introductorio extenso, meritorio y no exento de información útil sobre la obra —aunque algo caótico— y con numerosas notas a los poemas, que se han colocado incómodamente al final del texto. Estas son prolijas, pero reiterativas con respecto a mucho de lo que se dice en la introducción. Abundan las interpretaciones especulativas, las referencias al descatalogado libro The Compositions of Four Quartets (1978), de Helen Gardner, y aclaraciones de criterios aplicados en la traducción de algunas palabras y pasajes. Justificaciones que, sin embargo no han convencido a este lector de que la traducción de Andreu no sea poco fiel al original, altamente especulativa en la interpretación del texto en inglés de Eliot y, en general, excéntrica;

2. Eliot, T.S., Poesías reunidas, 1909-1962, Alianza Editorial, 1999. Trad.José María Valverde (ver aquí): solo diré que se trata de una excelente traducción en prosa de la obra de Eliot, muy fiel al texto inglés y decentemente volcada en castellano. Su introducción es bastante más concisa y menos especulativa que la de Andreu Jaume;

3. Williamson, George, A reader's Guide to T.S. Eliot. A Poem-by-Poem Analysis, Syracuse University Press, 1953 (reimpresión) (ver aquí): de esta guía sólo leí el capítulo 8, con apartados dedicados a cada uno de los cuatro cuartetos. Da unas orientaciones generales de la inspiración y significado de la obra que, a menudo, no pasa de un simple refraseo del propio texto de los poemas.

4. Narración del actor Ralph Fiennes para Audible: tras traducir al español los Cuatro Cuartetos, realice su lectura en inglés acompañándola de esta narración notable y bien realizada de Fiennes, lo cual multiplicó el caracter casi místico de la lectura:

Narración de los Cuatro Cuartetos por el actor Ralph Fiennes

Conclusión

A manera de resumen y conclusión, diré que la inmersión en la lectura, traducción y escucha de los Cuatro Cuartetos en su versión original en inglés ha sido para mi una experiencia intelectual y casi mística de primer orden y un contacto con la expresión literaria pura y perfecta en un idioma llevada a su extremo. No puedo darle menos de 5 estrellas.

[Keith · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a review of T.S. Eliot’s poetry. You can find my thoughts on that here:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Rather, this is a review of this particular edition of his works and the notes it provides. I haven’t read the entire two volumes (totally nearly 2,000 pages), but I have focused on a couple sections.

The reviews for these two volumes that I read were very positive. But I wonder – who is the audience for these books? The notes seems too exhaustive for the average reader, but not enough for the scholar.

How exhaustive are the notes? For An Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, the editors provide a definition of a possum that Eliot may or may not have read. It also includes 17 pages of Eliot’s references to the book in letters and other documents. The Waste Land (clocking in at about 22 pages including Eliot’s end notes) has 162 pages of commentary plus a 45-page textual history.

What are the substance of the notes? Many are useful and helpful, but some are less so. In Ash-Wednesday, Eliot has this line:

There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again

For this line, the editors refer to this quote from King Lear: “Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again.” Ok. This is interesting, but I’m not sure what it adds to the reading of Eliot’s poem. There are so many marginal (unhelpful?) notes like this that it is truly hard to find the valuable ones. Pages on pages of notes must be pored through to find one gem.

The books are also a bit confusing and unwieldy. Volume one opens with the poems that Eliot approved for his collected work before his death, followed by uncollected poems. These are presented neatly and in an easy-to-read format. Then it includes the commentary on these poems. Volume two opens with the Practical Cats poems, then goes to the commentary of that collection, then includes his translation of Anabasis, then commentary, then other unpublished verses mixed with the commentary. Then it ends with the textual history for the various works (mostly in volume one). Many of the previously unpublished poems in volume two are lost in reams of commentary.

So back to my original question: Who is this book for? To reap the full benefits, a reader must buy both volumes (at about an $80 investment). Certainly, some notes are required to fully appreciate Eliot. (If nothing else, the translations of the Greek and medieval Italian are needed.)

These volumes, though, seem too weedy and too convoluted for the average reader who simply wants some background to help them enjoy the poems. Readers could benefit from a shorter version of this book providing key commentary and background on the poems, but that book doesn’t exist.

If you are a hardcore Eliot reader and completist, this is a must have. Otherwise, casual readers can use the Collected Poems edition and check out these two volumes from the library to support their readings.

(Read The Wasteland notes 8/16.)

[Dustin the wind Crazy little brown owl]

I started this, didn't get very far, but I went some interesting places. I have to take the book back to the library. Might give it another try later.

One of my favorite authors, Dean Koontz, has used some T. S. Eliot books in his books. Particularly of mention is The Taking which relied heavily on The Waste Land, so those lines were familiar to me.

Favorite Passages:
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Do I dare
disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
______

It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
_______

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.


Preludes
II
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your aback, 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 . . .

IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock . . .

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

The Wastland
'That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
'Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?'
_______

I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
_______

But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
________

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
-But who is that on the other side of you?

The Hollow Men
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion
_______

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.
_______

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
_______

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
________

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Animula
In the fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree,
Pleasure in the wind, the sunlight and the sea;
Studies the sunlit pattern on the floor
And running stags around a silver tray;
Confounds the actual and the fanciful,
Content with playing cards and kings and queens,
What the fairies do and what the servants say.
The heavy burden of the growing soul
Perplexes and offends more, day by day;
Week by week, offends and perplexes more
With the imperatives of 'is and seems'
And may and may not, desire and control.
The pain of living and the drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Issues from the hand of time the simple soul
Irresolute and selfish, misshapen, lame,
Unable to fare forward or retreat,
Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,
Denying the importunity of the blood,
Shadow of its own shadows, spectre in its own gloom,
Leaving disordered papers in a dusty room;
Living first in the silence after the viaticum.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

T.S. Eliot , on his birthday September 26
Madness, ruin, and death; T.S. Eliot's poetry was a lamentation on the death of civilization in World War One, written with brilliance, a fragile beauty, and immense scholarship. In The Wasteland alone we have The Grail Quest and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the Iliad, Dante, The Tempest, the Satyricon, the Call of Ezekiel; his works recapitulate the whole of our cultural history and frame the birth of the modern world and the shattering of European aristocracies with the Fall of Rome and the descent of the classical world into a millennia of barbarism.
No one ever played the conservative side of the board better. His poetry may be read over the course of a lifetime without exhausting its value. Whosoever loves literature will find here a kindred spirit.
The Poems of T.S. Eliot, a massive two-volume edition sumptuously annotated by the Boston University scholar Christopher Ricks, would be my ideal reference work. Among the many wonderful critical studies are Hugh Kenner's The invisible poet: T.S.Eliot, and Helen Gardner's The Art of T.S. Eliot.

[Paul H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most impressive scholarly apparatus that I have ever seen in any context -- runner-up would probably be Cranston's Waka Anthology, the Hongs' volume of endnotes for Kierkegaard's Postscript, or finwake.com.

I didn't think that so much data about Eliot's poetry existed in the world, let alone could be gathered in a single book (roughly a million words of endnotes).

[Jack Caulfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a vague ambition to read more poetry this year. Starting with an old favourite. I don't have anything original to say about Eliot: brilliant, enigmatic, absorbing like little else.

The 'commentary' in this edition wasn't really what I expected. It consists of pages and pages (some 850 pages to the 350 taken up by the poems themselves, and in a smaller font) of quoted material from Eliot and others detailing the composition of, the allusions within, and the publication and reception of the poems. There's almost no commentary or explication from the editors themselves. A lot of this is really interesting, but it's not as useful as I'd like for illuminating the more obscure poems; there's little sense of prioritization of the more important material.

[George Siehl · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a reference book, but it is a great one. It also makes for very interesting reading for those with an interest in poetry, specifically that of T. S. Eliot. It includes Eliot's poetry and verse, all supplemented by sections dealing with the publishing history of each work, and a section of commentary. The latter is fascinating. It identifies sources for the ideas and phrases in the poems, offers excerpts from Eliot's letters referencing a particular piece, and includes critical assessments from scholars and critics of poetry. For students looking for topics for research papers it is a treasure chest. For readers who admire Eliot's work it offers illuminating insights likely to increase their admiration.

I read all the poems, many of which I had not heard of. I did not read every one of the 1300 plus pages, but did wander happily through the supporting commentary contained there.

This book is highly recommended for major libraries and for poetry specialists. Curious browsers may find much of interest.

[Ana Flores · Rating 5 out of 5]

[...] No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old... I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we frown.
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (fragmento)

Monarquista en política, clásico en literatura, anglocatólico en religión; económica y socialmente privilegiado desde la cuna, clasista, antisemita, en sus últimos años prosélito incansable y siempre tan pagado de sí mismo, no debiera el señor Eliot parecerme particularmente simpático, atractivo, admirable, digno siquiera de prestarle atención, mas, por milagros de la poesía, ha acabado siendo no sólo mi poeta favorito en lengua inglesa, sino uno de mis poetas preferidos sin más.

Y es que, muy aparte las peculiaridades de su personalidad (tan fuerte, autoritaria, petulante y sólo a medias aplacada por la religión), la obra de T. S. Eliot maravilla por su incisividad, su compleja profundidad, el pavoroso (y tan realista) retrato que hace del hombre moderno y la Tierra Baldía en que le tocó vivir, destrozados ya los dogmas en la era del progreso.

A manera de historias, con una voz distante que mira sin embargo con cuidado a cada personaje, a veces seria, a veces mordaz y otras tantas destanteada, los poemas de Eliot nos hablan del desconcierto, del pasmo, la desazón, del hartazgo y de un desgarramiento tan grave entre el ser y el mundo que no lo deja vivir en paz. El hombre está tan sólo en esta tierra despoblada de sentido, en esta tierra baldía, que la burla, el cinismo, una egoísta materialidad o estupefacción alelante no parecen respuestas tan erradas.

Y si bien tras su conversión religiosa, el poeta intenta ver en Dios una respuesta, una justificación, una salida, una explicación al sinsentido de la existencia y (sin demasiado éxito) intenta convencernos de que rendirnos a ese Dios recobrará nuestro equilibrio, el mundo real en que vivimos (en el que él también vivió) no cambió en lo más mínimo y siguió siendo tan desolado en los Four Quartets, como en “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.

Al inaugurar (junto con Pound) el modernismo en lengua inglesa, la poesía de Eliot se despega de los temas, las formas y concepción misma de la poesía que tuvieron sus predecesores; en él ya no hay una métrica precisa, los temas se desacralizan por completo, se apoya en el habla común, cada poema pareciera simple prosa mas, apariencias aparte, tienen siempre un ritmo y musicalidad bien definidas, es una pauta clásica que el mismo Eliot consideraba indispensable para hablar de poesía, y distinguirla de lo que no es poesía.

Cargada de referencias, compleja en estructura, densa, polifónica, difícil de entender a la primera, o segunda y hasta tercer lectura, la poesía del señor Eliot me ha atrapado sin embargo como pocas, y sé que volveré a ella una y otra vez, como se busca la compañía de un gran maestro.

(Algo hay que decir sobre esta edición en particular, que contiene no sólo aquello que Eliot publicó en vida, sino un buen número de poemas de juventud y unos cuantos de madurez jamás publicados, aunque, lo que más resalta de este volumen enorme, es precisamente su enormidad: nada más y nada menos que alrededor de novecientas páginas de notas y comentarios varios, que no comprendo de verdad quien podría leer íntegramente o con qué propósito. En todo caso, seguro que el reducidísimo público de un libro como este fue la razón de que lo hallara con algo así como setenta por ciento de descuento, y las notas, a veces, realmente resultan útiles. Es un libro trabajado con esmero, el cuidado editorial es exquisito, es precioso, y, quién sabe, poco a poco, muy poco a poco, bien podría algún día acabar de leerme todas esas notas.)

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talk for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read much of the night, and go south in the winter.
The Waste Land. I. The Burial of the Dead (fragmento)

[Johns · Rating 5 out of 5]

A magnificent book for any English lit major who only gave Mr. Eliot the slightest touch in college. The commentary section's value rivals the poems themselves. At last, I'm beginning to understand the richness of his work. Will buy this book in the very near future!

[Connor Lougheed · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE POEMS OF T.S. ELIOT, Vol. 1: 4
(note: this review concerns the poems of T.S. Eliot, not the extensive commentary provided in this volume.)
A surreal dark labyrinth of visceral real nameless emotion. Eliot weaves rhymes you never expect in the strangest of places, then breaks rhyme until he can add it again and catch you without guard; his rhymes are simple, yet stunningly unique. When he isn't rhyming, his words march like consistent soldiers—then break—then march again, aided by repetitive commands. A master of repetition, metaphor, and patterning, nearly every poem by T.S. Eliot could be studied for years—lit. “Every line is a research project.” In his Uncollected Poems, there's an interesting moment where you can feel the introduction of T.S.’s later inspired poetics (repetition, references, sound work, wordplay) among his juvenalia (false rhymes, syllabic meter, boring concepts): “Spleen” and “First Debate Between The Body And Soul.” There are also a great amount of poems about Pollicle Dogs and Jellicle Cats—and cats in general—and rhymes that seem made for children about other animals, which were a slog to get through.

Favorites:
“The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock”: Lonely romantics.
“The Waste Land”: Unreal cities, the transition between life and death.
“The Hollow Men”: The vain deaths of men indoctrinated into war.
“Ash Wednesday”: Grappling with spirituality and being forgotten after death.
“The Journey Of The Magi”: The birth of Jesus and Christianity, but also the death.
“Coriolan”
“Choruses From ‘The Rock’”: Men work for the system but are moving away from God and the Church, when they should move toward it.
(Four Quartets) “Burnt Norton”: The passage of time and the turning of the planets and life becoming death.
“East Coker”: Time passing life leaves no trace.
“The Dry Salvages”: From rocks off the shore, comes thoughts of toiling life.
“Little Gidding”: England is home and all shall eventually return home; an examination of what choices humans have in life.
(Uncollected Poems) “First Debate Between The Body And Soul”
“Suppressed Complex”
“Do I Know How I Feel? Do I Know What I Think?”
“So Through The Evening, Through The Violet Air”
“Introspection”
“The Engine”

[Toby · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did in fact read most of the notes to Eliot's poems in this volume. The poems themselves (including the uncollected poems and the editorial composite of The Waste Land take up a mere 346 pages. The notes add a further 1000 pages. The notes, however, are worth reading. I have lived with Eliot's poetry now for 30 years so to read an extensive commentary on them is both rewarding and discombobulating. I feel like one of those Japanese Christians who fled to the mountains during the Seventeenth Century persecutions only to emerge 200 years later with a completely warped understanding of Christian doctrine. My own interpretations of, particularly, the Four Quartets don't appear to be what T.S. Eliot may have meant at all. Mind you, that doesn't seem to have bothered Eliot who was quite happy for readers to reach their own conclusions.

One rather delightful discovery was that Eliot had read Karl Barth's commentary on Romans and that his intersection of the timeless moment with time comes straight of this. Elsewhere, the uncollected poems mostly give good reason as to why they were uncollected and we have a great deal to thank Ezra Pound for his blue pencil scarifying of Eliot's first draft of The Waste Land.

[Les Abernathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are two types of poetry books. Those 'of' poetry and those 'about' poetry. This collection tries to be a little of both and succeeds only partially. First, it has some of Eliot's best work. The Four Quartets are a particular highlight. However, it also collects every post it note from Eliot as if it was made out of gold. Second, most of the volume's page count comes from notes. These mostly just source where certain quotes came from without interjecting opinion or interpretation beyond the purely factual. This could be good or bad depending on how you like your collections processed and bound together. If you already have a collection, then just stick with that. If not, you can't really go wrong with this one.

[Joyce · Rating 3 out of 5]

my eyes burn after tearing through this in four days. contains some of the greatest poetry in english but also plenty of doggerel (and not just in the unpublished stuff), but contains even more of what might be the most futilely outsized annotations ever put to page, which are so impractical they might make it useless. the scale and tenuousness of the annotations make charles kinbote look reasonable

[Emmett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did not finish this book, nor am I likely to, at least not in one sitting. I do not think it was written for that purpose. Opened it to find a reference, fell into the commentary and only managed to rescue myself an hour later, emerging from the endless cross-references and quotations from letters, remarks, and assorted writings, in a dream-like state. For enthusiasts of T.S. Eliot this is a godsend.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

The gift that keeps giving....

[Baden Eunson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb collection, well-edited. There is a second volume. This one contains the rare erotica of Eliot (!), the tall girl poems. A pleasant shock. A beautifully produced book.

[Sydney Hack · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF'd at about 30%. Tried to read this as an audio book and that's simply not my preferred mode of absorbing poetry.

[Fin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pound's slightly envious claim that unlike he and Yeats, Eliot had "modernised himself" is completely vindicated in this. Reading the uncollected poems here, it's astonishing how quickly Eliot found the voice he'd go on to write Prufrock with: in a matter of a couple years he moved from very promising student poetry to the kind of hard-edged, faintly depressive satire and geometrically precise, lilting free verse that won him the admiration of Pound, Lewis and the burgeoning Modernist movement. I knew when I got this massive volume a couple years back that I would appreciate reading all of his work, not just those better-hewn poems that Eliot himself selected for publication, but I couldn't predict just how valuable and beautiful so much of his work that otherwise goes uncollected as juvenalia, offcuts or drafts really is. Particularly astounding are the miscellaneous poems from the manuscript of The Waste Land: pieces like "The Death of St Narcissus", 'After the turning of the inspired days', 'So through the evening, through the violet air', and "The Death of the Duchess" contain in perfect miniature all the icy, unsettling glory of their archi-poem. I think I'll also be returning to poems like "Entretien dans un parc", "The Love Song of St Sebastian", "Bacchus and Ariadne: 2nd Debate between the Body and Soul", "Ode", and "Do I know how I feel? Do I know what I think?" for the rest of my life too. (I know just quoting the titles of a load of poems makes for a fairly boring review - this is mostly so that whenever I return to this book page I'm reminded to read these again.)

On the perception that Eliot is obscure and intellectual, he writes "I am anything but an intellectual; more nearly a pure émotif." His later assertion that he doesn't "want to be obscure" I think holds less water lol (though it is certainly true that he didn't want to be appreciated only by an 'intellectual few'), but the major contention is definitely true. Four Quartets perhaps excepted, Eliot's poetry is decidedly not intellectual: it works on the level of feeling and sentiment, and (at least until The Rock - Geoffrey Hill has written—derisively—of the abandonment of Coriolan for these choruses as the moment Eliot moved from unsettling 'pitch' to a more reassuring 'tone') where he philosophizes he does so not to detail or argue a worldview but rather to capture an emotional complex. His voices are undeniably philosophical, but they are the voices of those tangled in the spider's web of philosophy, perhaps trying to escape, perhaps searching for an ultimately elusive clarity, or perhaps having given up altogether. What force of declaration there is often affect, something that inevitably falters in "the awful daring of a moment's surrender".

So through the evening, through the violet air
One tortured meditation dragged me on
Concatenated words from which the sense seemed gone⁠—
⁠—When comes, to the sleeping or the wake
The This-do-ye-for-my-sake
When to the sullen sunbaked houses and the trees
The one essential word that frees
The inspiration that delivers and expresses
The wrinkled road which twists and winds and guesses:
Oh, through the violet sky, through the evening air
A chain of reasoning whereof the thread was gone
Gathered strange images through which we walked alone:

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper-music on those strings
The shrill bats quivered through the violet air
Whining, and beating wings.
A man, distorted by some mental light
Yet of abnormal powers
I saw him creep head downwards down a wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells.
And there were chanting voices out of cisterns and of wells.

My feverish impulsions gathered head
A man lay flat upon his back, and cried
'It seems that I have been a long time dead:
Do not report me to the established world
It has seen strange revolutions since I died'.

As a deaf mute swimming deep below the surface
Knowing neither up nor down, swims down and down
In the calm deep water where no stir nor surf is
Swims down and down;
And about his hair the seaweed purple and brown.

So in our fixed confusion we persisted, out from town.

[Anthony Crupi · Rating 5 out of 5]

At thirteen hundred small-font leaves,
It’s Tom in all his sins and graces.
Prodigious.
From Prufrock’s timid overtures
To Gidding’s Pentecostal fire,
Resolute flinching.
A withering genius that fed
On Herbert, Donne, Dante, Pope
He transformed self-
Loathing into a cottage industry;
Among the things the poet feared:
Cows and arm hair and fiddler crabs.

And ugh, the late verses about fucking.

[Nathan Augustine · Rating 5 out of 5]

The greatest poet of all time. American turned English countryside monarchist writing writing in stunning prose about little gardens, nice things, sad things, cities, the end of days, a little dash of global languages mixed in just the right way…

[Dylan Cook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Worth noting that I didn't read all 1000 pages of critical commentary attached to this (though that was all done brilliantly).