a bloomin’ wasteland, maybe…

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)

American-British writer, popularly acclaimed as a great poet of the 20th century

At long last, I’ve tried T. S. Eliot’s poetry.

Maybe I’ll put Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot back on the shelf, and try again after a while.

Maybe not.

“…We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men…”

From “The Hollow Men,” 1925, by T. S. Eliot

It’s not that I mind Eliot’s deliberate contradictions so much. I’m willing to be provoked. I’m open to being tantalized. I’m ready to be pushed or pulled outside my comfort zone.

The sticky point for me, with Eliot’s poetry, is that I never seem to get to the point, or maybe I simply don’t get the point. When I get to the end of one of his longish poems, I’m really not sure where I started, or where I wandered, or where I arrived.

I find little coherence in Eliot’s words and phrases and passages.

I think of myself as a wordsmith, and I love the beauty of elegant phrases and shimmering, specific, steely, selective, stately, splendid words that tell a delicious story or evoke a bloom of emotion.

For my taste, T. S. Eliot’s poetry isn’t tasty, and it’s a bloomin’ wasteland of jumbled words, fractured images, and unfinished imaginations.

If you’re wondering where all the flowers have gone, don’t look for answers in Eliot’s work.

Source: T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1958), 101.

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Fire in the Lake (book review)

you should have read it in 1972…

by Frances FitzGerald

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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 73 free verse poems,

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