What do you think of T.S. Eliot and his works? Feel free to be wordy!?

Answer 1

This was the writer who gave plagiarism a new twist. When I was introduced to his "Collected Poems" at school, I felt that I was being presented not so much with a collection of poems as a vast reading list, a new and dazzling world full of exciting people. Perhaps this is the idea. One sends students off to read things like the "Upanishads", the "Bhaghavad Gita" and the "Golden Bough" for the sake of a few words, a single concept. But it does get them reading.

Not, of course, that T.S. Eliot was writing with examination curricula in mind. He was really attempting to show the world, as it were, in a grain of sand and eternity in a flower. A few words evoke images of words beyond. We find ourselves sailing with Tristan and Isolde or overhearing snatches of crude conversation in an East London pub; we see the majesty of Tudor England as Elizabeth and Essex dip oars on the River Thames and we are brought to earth by a sordid reference to a quick seduction.

"Ash Wednesday" is beautiful and serene:
"Who walked between the violet and the violet,
The varied ranks of varied green,
Going in white and blue, in Mary's colour..."
Unforgettable lines, which remain engraved in my mind and come to mind frequently.

Then there is the disturbing world of the "Hollow Men", which perhaps has more relevance today than then as people do not learn to think so much as recycle; "headpieces stuffed with straw, alas!" and the incursions into the world of J. Alfred Prufrock (in which the reader secretly sees bits of himself); the Florence of "Portrait of a Lady" (which the reader hopes is not a portent of what the future holds) and then the sudden loveliness of "La Figlia che Piange" (I've been looking for that statue ever since). And finally the best of all: The Four Quartets, beguiling, fascinating, meaty.
I still haven't completed my reading list, but each time I tick one of those books off it is a triumph (the latest being Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness").

T.S. Eliot's plays I find static. I think that they are plays for radio or for reading aloud in poetry and arts groups. Nobody has ever thought of filming "The Confidential Clerk" or "Murder in the Cathedral", but I have heard both on the radio and enjoyed the experience.

I had a record once of T.S. Eliot reading his own poems in his curious, reedy voice. He put relatively little expression into the exercise. Perhaps that was why he wasn't really a dramatist!

Answer 2

Don't know a ton about the man, but I think his works are very interesting. Even though we're supposedly in the post-modern age, I think his modernist themes still speak to us today. There's something about his writing that I find both attractive and repellent. Eliot's poetry is aimed at the intellect as much as its is at the senses and the emotions. While this makes his works compelling and challenging, sometimes they also come off as snobbish and overly academic.

Christians tend to make a big deal about his conversion from atheism to Christianity and try to claim him as one of their own. I like to think of Eliot's conversion and the way his new religious sensibilities appear in his later poems in broader terms. To me, Eliot's later works are more about a skeptical, modern man coming to terms with the realities of a secular age that has broken with it's long cultural tradition, and with trying to find meaning and a connection to the past by means of an older spiritual tradition than it is about Christianity in particular. What he is writing about is applicable to more people than just those of the Christian religion.

Everything considered, he's one of my favorite poets.

Answer 3

He was a real poet, at least until he got religion and in flashes thereafter.
In the first edition of his 1920 poems there's one that has been cut from every subsequent edition. It's about masturbation or menstruation or something like that.

Answer 4

My first encounter with his works was in Andrew Lloyd Weber's mucisal "Cats". So, I have to say that his "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" is definetly my favorite. I like "Old Deuteronomy" the best.