ari’s Reviews > Selected Poems > Status Update

listening to radiohead and annotating my eliot poem book wow #whiteboymaxxing

- hollow men (10/10) forever one of my favourite poems and what got me to appreciate poetry when I was younger- astonishing!
- ash wednesday (5/10) rlly beautiful 1st act and then the 5 following… yeah idk about this whole religious salvation as solving post ww1 poverty, massacres and man made famine dawg

as an atheist, reading t.s.eliot’s poems post his anglicanism conversion genuinely feels like the dog “he tryna ignore it” meme like what are we rlly doing here man

also ofc pretty much all eliot's portrayals of women r misogynist bcs even when they are explored w/ complexity, they are passive, hysterical, submissive etc. and often their lack of feminine sexual desire is used to showcase the end of civilisation's renewal but i do think it's interesting how eliot does showcase modernity's focus on marriage as the death of love and how women bear the brunt of this subjugation

- whispers of immortality (9/10)
- mr. eliot's sunday morning service (5/10), cool but wtf does any of this really mean
- sweeney among the nightingales (4/10) t.s. eliot ur incel is leaking out
- wasteland 1. burial of the dead (7/10)

- 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

reading 'the hippopotamus' and listening to music and crass's 'so what' comes on, and specifically the part where they sing "So what if Jesus died on the cross? So what about the fucker, I don't give a toss! So what if the master walked on the water? I don't see him trying to stop the slaughter!" LMFAOOOO THE STARS ALIGN SO NATURALLY

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!