ari’s Reviews > Selected Poems > Status Update

- sweeney erect (7/10) --> i feel as though this poem is probably deeply misogynist but in the modern context, it rlly reworks perfectly to display the apathy of men to women's suffering
- a cooking egg (10/10) --> perfection. commodification of historical figures, removal of intimate connections, apallingly the most relevant poem i've read yet. we're fucking cooked!
- the hippopotamus (9/10) --> fuck the church

t.s. eliot your pen game too holy, your swag too ceaseless, your drip unfathomable, your mind too fire

- gerontion (9/10), new favourite, hate how searingly relevant these poems are. christ as no longer a gentle lamb but a tiger, a predator. there is no salvation when weak minds are rife. driven mad with desire.
- burbank with a baedeker (7.5/10) had to pull out the google for this one but once i did, fire

- the love song of j.alfred prufrock (10/10, genuinely unbeatable even after reading it 50 times holy fuck)
- portrait of a lady (6.5/10)
- preludes (image of ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots has never left my mind, 8/10)
- rhapsody on a windy night (8/10 the world held in lunar synthesis, a madman unable to resuscitate a dead geranium, losing your grasp on reality and still putting the shoes at the door)

bcs reading t.s.eliot for the first time in english really did fundamentally change me and finding this at a book fair a year ago for $1 did feel like god themself embraced me. re-reading this and listening to rm's RPWP, 2 pieces of art that i feel the most understood in my life by, that mean the most to me oh modernist alienated emotionally paradoxical existential masterpieces you are so near and dear to me!