Skip navigation

 Login or Register | Member Centre

50 greatest books

T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems, 1909-1962

FRASER SUTHERLAND

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

Latest comment posted at 7:35 PM EST 19/06/08

For T.S. Eliot, there were no things but in ideas. ...Read the full article

This conversation is closed

  1. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: I wonder what would TSEliot think of the morphing of categories as the notion of books in English was altered to mean any book as long as it has been translated and book which normally means the novel with perhaps a stretch to include epic verse to become nearly meaningless by including works of philosophy ideological twaddle and now poetry. How far can cookbooks or books on aesthetics or criticism be behind. I was rereading for obscure reasons Northrop Frye, actually a biography as I stumbled upon some of his oeuvre and thought this could be the Canadian entry now that Marshall MacLuhan is no longuer in vogue. So TSEliot didnt write books he wrote articles monographs and poems. In the sense of economic production how many book does Canada produce a year, by all means each individual bound printed leaves of paper would qualify, but when we ordinarily speak of books we mean novels almost exclusively. It is quite a different tragedy that when I see someone with a book it invariably turns out to be a detective crime cowboy or romance subliterary product. So we fantasize when we imagine that people read Plato Dante or Erasmus for fun or self mprovement delight or learning. Mostly just to get through to Eng 101. So the linguistic prosodic rhetorical and structuralist revolution of this aesthetically anarchic but politically ideologically religiously theologically ultraconservative philosophe masquerading as a vates or bard of Anglo America is hardly a writer of books. His poems are noble if indigestible and his dramatic sense is nil. He must be laughing. They all thought his poetry was about obscure ideas whereas he knew and exemplified that it was verbal music, merely the sound and consonance. Rave poetry or whatever it's called is garbage not because it is devoid of meaning but because it's cacophony. TS Eliot is a great poet not for his ideas but because of its sublime music. Not as obvious as Dylan Thomas but as subtle as YBYeats. A poet not a writer.
  2. Robert Nadeau from Ornex, France writes: T.S. Eliot was obviously a poetical genius as evidenced by the many admirers of his works. For me they were nevertheless a nightmare. In my second year at University (1953-54), they were included in the course I followed on American and Canadian Literature. Although our professor was top rate, I couldn't even begin to fathom Eliot. As the exams approached at the end of the academic year, I spent sleepless nights dreading that there would be a compulsory question concerning him. In the event, there was a question about Eliot, but it was optional and I was able to duck it like a frightened boxer. I thanked the Lord for his mercy upon me.
  3. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: People get bogged down just like in classic literature by all the literary allusions gods godesses nymphs satyrs and suchlike jetsam and flotsam, but the point is to ignore all those stage props of collage for this guy is more Picasso than Munch and just read the poem for its sound. Same as I read Milton in a month of agony then in one day, first worried about every obscure reference then just for the sound of a ciceronian period not a blank verse line. You can read the Wasteland in a week or in half an hour. Summa summarum no wonder Eliot loved Dante so much and rightly because he probably had him figured out. Both of them have SFA to do with imports of mediaeval philosophy or Divine attributes nor constitution of the universe or meaning of space and time. Baloney. They were lyric poets who wrote about themselves, which is their wont like classic composers, the resonances of their souls or more likely of their borborygmi supplying the coda to their eructations. As far as the antisemitism it's just a flavour or a Scriabin note or Swinburne line. The irony gets brown fog thick, his dada was a brick merchant, people gathered for a pleasure trip to Auschwitz were mostly in brickyards. So the poor bugger meets his only squeeze and marries and is fool enough to go live with Bertrand Russell the most notorious libertine and degenerate in the UK. Any female from age 9 to 90 was at risk no matter if daughter wife mother granddaughter of his host. It takes a British aristocrat and philosopher to be so low. Hence the Wasteland. A mysogynist poem by its inception but the truth is obscured and hidden so much so that we thought for nearly a century that it was a metaphysical meditation on the state of mankind. Or a rather pedestrian view like of the Group of Seven as mere post war angst. Or all the hokum about Frasers hanged god and Westons grail, mere scaffolding and obscurantist collage. He is lying with all his footnotes. Or deceiving the tone deaf.
  4. leo bloom from radisson, sask, canada, Canada writes: Hoo-wee! Lotusland - 3 hours between posts. Did you cram all night? Did you try and jam as many big words and artsy-fartsyness into the limits of the field? Roll down your trousers brother and relax, you're too smart by half! Fraser Sutherland writes that 'Eliot the poet must be rescued from thesis mongers and academic apologists...' I say this forum has to be rescued from wordy blowhards who hijack the thing to cram as much quasi-bighead babble in as they can. I say scroll up and read the Greer article - the acumen you are waving about here is great and pale and rubbery and nobody needs to see it!
  5. D. B. from Greater Sask., Canada writes: I would rather defend everyone's right to say what they want. I know I need that small mercy myself. Um, um, oh yes, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock- lyrical it is.
  6. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: Blooming genius and aficionado of poesy I wrote because I reread Wasteland just to see and above all hear the music if there is any in it and to see if there is any grove of Nemi where Frasers god king gets slaughtered. Yup and nope.
  7. leo bloom from radisson, sask, canada, Canada writes: Ahhh, D.B. there are many 'defenders' of speech who've been hoisted by their own petards. 'I would defend everyone's right to say what they want'...that's what I did, are you defending me? Or are you laying down your jacket for lotusland to tread? Would you 'defend' what Tom Lukiwski said? (Prairie politics being germane to Greater Sask, eh?) Sometimes we can be too absolute with our merits. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, even Stalin believed in the freedom of speech that he liked. Sometimes nonsense is just nonsense; sometimes a pot can and should call the kettle black. As your man Prufrock said, 'That is not it at all, That is not what I meant at all'...And for lotusland - for some reason, whenever I read Waste Land, I read it to the tune of American Pie...what say you about that?
  8. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: It's a start.
  9. richard cormier from sarnia, Canada writes: based on your first post about lotusland, leo bloom, I take it that since you wrote "nobody needs to see it" meaning lotusland's post, also means that everyone should send their comments to you before posting them so you can determine whether anyone else needs to read them. right?
  10. leo bloom from radisson, sask, canada, Canada writes: You take it the wrong way then Richard. Re-read the post...I don't care who comments or how many times they do and I certainly would never stoop to the low that you suggest - I am no censor. However, as Fraser Sutherland noted, T.S. Eliot 'must be rescued from thesis mongers and academic apologists...' and I might add self-indulgent pseudo-intellectuals who lay it on Wikipedia thick who seem to think that their rantings, as wordy and esoteric as they are, are vital. I say it is nothing more than puffed-up exhibitionism - you know, watch as I whip 'er out for all the world to envy. It's a little bit like the leech-bird who perches on the backside of a raging elephant and goes on and on about the big dust he makes. For me, that big dust just makes my eyes water and my nose itch - if you like that cloud, then have at 'er. Maybe you and D.B. should start your own little crusade to rid the threads of guys like me - guys who don't think that everyones point is worthy of a chivalric save; guys who don't want to see the big-headed worm out from its fly...c'est la.
  11. richard cormier from sarnia, Canada writes: hey leo, maybe you're wrong, maybe folks just post what they see and think about these things...you know..a writer writes what they see right? this chair i'm sitting on has a swivel like an office chair and maybe to you it would be pretentious and maybe to lotusland it might be a symbol of the decliine and fall of mankind, but we would all say what we see. you wouldnt want someone to write what they dont see, or would you? I don't really see this but I think I will write that I see it..and besides..I scrolled through the 440 plus comments on the 50 greatest books and the comments are all over the place. some are high brow some are low brow but what i see are people saying what they see.
  12. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: Blooming saskatoon berry contributes nothing of his erudition nor sensibility of poetic appreciation to the understanding of TS Eliot which is what is at issue here or ought to be. Or what is poetry and what is modern poetry ie free verse. I wonder BTW what the poet thought of Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman. Rhythm structure sound is what it's all about or it would be prose or doggerel. The connotative and denotative meaning while not irrelevant are incidental like do you use cymbals or kettle drums. If new criticism means careful study of text new poesy means careful study of sound. If you write a hundred thousand lines and one becomes memorable it is not because of sense but because of sound. Of course not a meaningless divorced sound but sound of consequence milieu structure and density of reduplication or pattern and flow. Which is why you recognise Mozart vs unmusical modern dreck which fails in all these parameters. But I wouldnt listen to even Bach when reading Eliot nor Hindemith or Stockhausen nor look at a Picasso or a Matisse or even a Rouault or a Bacon, it insults both. How can you listen to the music of the words or lack of it when the sound is masked by noise? TS Eliot is one of the iconic poets of the last century, his understanding is not irrelevant to whatever direction our philosophy science politics literature poetry will take. The fact that poets have vanished to irrelevancy and ridicule and worse than that contempt and insignificance is only partly due to their obscurantism and complexity, after all the putative extraneous meaning all that remains are the poems, ie rhythmic structured phonemes of a known or unknown language. So this dinosaur of political economy and Anglican theology if there be such a beast is not unlike Frida Kahlo a Communist surrealist or any Dadaist. He really must be laughing in his grave. Whatever his ideas his poetry is of a poeta doctus like Milton or Dante and not at all like Swinburne.
  13. Alexander Inglis from Toronto, Canada writes: One insight may be overlooked in this ping pong commentary: TS Eliot was a superb musician but he chose to words, instead of notes. In their own way, (the poetry of) Tennessee Williams and Hermann Hesse is also deliciously consumed more as music than ideas. On the other hand, if you want ideas about music, read Thomas Mann.

    ¶ And thanks for the references to the Germaine Greer article, and Shakespeare's Wife ... the bard, too, was a musician extraordinaire!
  14. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: This gets spookier. Finally I read the 4 Quartets the title a joke of course for there be no four instruments. His intense contempt for the Romantics becomes a trifle absurd as there are no poems which resonate more to Wordsworths Intimations of Immortality an Ode than these four quartets. That is conceived of as woolly mystic drivel not sublime noble sentiment... plus ca change. The collage technique of the Wasteland his most notorious poem is here pared down to the bare essentials like a Cycladic figurine with bare suggestions of corporeal time erosion and purification by burial. Barely a single German word and an Italian line, the rest could pass for normal English if a bit ecstatic. The other creepy part is not its Picasso retreat from cubist collage and textbreak to reclassicised Romantic speech of the common folk, but the dubious rosicrucianism and hinduism of his mysticism which might have been adequate in western form. Talk about being politically correct, lest anyone damn him for being an orthodox albeit mystic Christian he throws in some Eastern stuff and new age hokum. The dance and the axis he calls it centre and circle instead of Yeats gyre and axis is not Dantes circles or orbs nor spheres. So he is quite comfortably beyond orthodox Christianity in imagery if not in doctrine or theology. But it is completely unnecessary to delve into mediaeval mystics Julian of Norwych or San Juan de la Cruz I'd rather have a go at Penelope Cruz these poems can be read simply as poems. There are sublime passages cringe Oh Longinus but the quarrel I have here is not default in music but a lack of objective correlative. In Chaucer Dante Homer Virgil Shakespeare you know exactly where you are time place person. Their material realism is unassailable, their compasses true and their course straight even in Heaven or Hell. With TS Eliot at times we lose our bearings, this is a characteristic of poetasters. But all 20th Cy art is such dislocated sensibility.
  15. Rolloff deBunk from Calgary - centre of bad road design, Canada writes: I say old chaps go easy on the banter shall we, you lost me at the cabbage crates over the briney!
  16. Rolloff deBunk from Calgary - centre of bad road design, Canada writes: Sorry my mistake - make that briny - I shall have a word with my secretary
  17. Dave T from midwest, Canada writes: The Wasteland is a poem bursting with references to literary antecedents, among them Ovid, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Nerval; tailor made for the thesis mongers and academics whose scaffolding of its allusive qualities perpetuates its appeal and made it as much of a lock for this list as Melville will be in the coming weeks. Watch and see. If yes to Eliot, then how about Rilke on the strength of the Duino Elegies, Wallace Stevens on the strength of his enigmatic obscurity, or Neruda on the strength of his earthy sensual poems and very popular appeal. I read once where Picasso was said to have badly grieved the premature death of Apollinaire, and also the later death of Rene Char, the overlooked modernist poet who would be my first choice, ahead of Eliot, a poet with a light touch, who understood, as he said, that “spring doesn’t see the gracious ones turn green.”
  18. leo bloom from radisson, sask, canada, Canada writes: You may be right richard, maybe I was a little quick to close the shutters on the lotusland's disquisition, I just find it a little offensive when somebody drapes themselves over a thread as a rambling oligarch of the arts - like the proverbial bully on the playground: "Everyone, listen to me! Listen to mememeME!" Churlish, childish, bullies do that - they also fall quickly back to the roots of their mettle; they call people names. Did you notice how the loquacious lotus does that in his posts? I am the 'Blooming genius or the Blooming saskatoon berry [who] contributes nothing of his erudition nor sensibility of poetic appreciation...' Did I mention that facetiousness is another 'bully' trait? But he may be partly right - I haven't properly contributed, and so, without the paraphrased Norton or the re-hashed Coles and/or Cliffs notes and without spilling the entire contents of a thesaurus onto this post, I might try. I like Eliot because he represents a continuum for me. I am a devoted fan of Victorian literature but more importantly I am drawn strongly to the late reign and early years of the Edwardians and the shift from the 19th to the 20th centuries culminating with the explosion of the world that was the Great War: that was the fin de siecle. I take the social history of that time through its writers. You can read the American Whitman's Drum Taps say and then read Hardy's pre-war Channel Firing; you can read Brooke - early days optimisim; you can read Owen and Sassoon and Gurney and Blunden and Apollinaire - death-throes; and you can read Aldington and Graves and Joyce and Eliot and Sandburg and Kipling - the aftermath: the new season. There is also a 'scaffolding' for such a format. You might try Paul Fussell, Modris Eksteins, Jay Winter or even the Bloomsbury artists for guidance. That's my contribution lotus. Scoff if you must. And richard, sometimes a chair is just a chair, eh?
  19. lotusland maritimer from Sault Ste Marie, Canada writes: A nice try bury bloom. Mais revenons a nos moutons. I am actually quite thrilled with this selection as I know a bit about it and had a chance to reread his ouevre just as in the only other case all of Gullivers travels. He is quite an anglo fussy worrywart prude puritan which makes his private life a disaster but musta helped his poetry. His essay no not essay but barely more than a selfrevealing note on Hamlet is risible. He barely gets into the gang violence and slaughter and then displays erudition with obscure parallel or borrowed plays and legends missing by the way Hamlets Mill completely whatever its merits but his real issue is with mother son conflict missing the subliminal incest theme. That the inexplicable scenes and parts are from unexpurgated remnants of the sources each with different axes to grind. What he leaves out is telling. Not a drowned word about Ophelia some of the most sublime poetry of the play other than the rhetoric of the two monologues which he mentions just. If you read Hamlet and completely miss Ophelia the most sexy and profound of Sh's heroines then you are a eunuch. A moral mental psychological even if not a physical eunuch. This makes him miss the most sublime objective correlative in all of literature the death by drowning scene with the catalogue of flowers. Now if that aint o. c. then I dont know what is. A flower is not only beautiful because of its beauty as such but because it is ephemeral and even neanderthals 50.000 years ago strew flowers over burials. Then he misses which no writer of plays could possibly miss the play within a play a hilarious send up by Sh. of the other inferior dramatists and worse hams than he was. I remember as a child I was irritated by this useless digression missing its seminal structural and critical and comedic import. So our poet as a good subjective correlative of his defective soul and overwrought mind misses Mamlet in its entirety and reveals -what a brilliant typo!
  20. leo bloom from radisson, sask, canada, Canada writes: And again for richard - yes, yes there are many useful and worthy comments in those 400 plus postings. I was going to suggest Dave T as valuable critic but I see he has made his presence known here too and good for us. But, yeah, Dave T or Dawn or many of the countless others who contribute to this book thread are indispensable and much appreciated by a middle-of-the-road reader like me - they elucidate, they enlighten and they escort...many, but not all. So yes lotus, back to the task at hand, eh? Eliot once wrote, "We can say of Shakespeare (you brought him in lotus) that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account." So 'ham' steak it is then lotus, for never has a Soo-city rake turned so little knowledge into such a dull-drab discourse. And with that foul fowl, I bid you adieu.
  21. D. B. from Greater Sask., Canada writes: Publish or perish. Or is that, publish or prairies? Ouch. Sorry, Willa Cather.
  22. lotusland maritimer from Canada writes: The Wasteland is an anarchic dadaist symbolist collage the literary equivalent of Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon and any number of cubist paintings.
    In short a destructive tsunami of verbal assault on literature decadent and antidecadent simultaneously.
    So twentieth century and so passé.
    Now if I were to steal I would steal from Horace Aristotle Plato Longinus Boethius St Augustine Dante TS Eliot Pope Pascal Montaigne. I'll leave you Cliffs or Coles notes. Acually I do have one on chess openings.
    I cant find my photocopy edition of Wasteland with Ezra Pounds annotations perhaps be damned it would have been useful this week.
    But I did find Edmund Wilsons letters we'll see if he has anything to say about it.
  23. Bobby the K from Bogarttown, Canada writes: There's a bit of a running gag among people posting on music threads that Rush fans write the most wordy posts.

Comments are closed

Thanks for your interest in commenting on this article, however we are no longer accepting submissions. If you would like, you may send a letter to the editor.

Report an abusive comment to our editorial staff

close

Alert us about this comment

Please let us know if this reader’s comment breaks the editor's rules and is obscene, abusive, threatening, unlawful, harassing, defamatory, profane or racially offensive by selecting the appropriate option to describe the problem.

Do not use this to complain about comments that don’t break the rules, for example those comments that you disagree with or contain spelling errors or multiple postings.

Back to top