T. S. Eliot: The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950

I'm not at all rating this book five stars; that's my rating for T.S. Eliot's plays. This book was the typical library edition and has everything wrong with it: the cover of an old, wise Eliot (why not a young maverick one?), "Complete" in the title when it's not at all complete, big, heavy, hardback and way too literary looking for the passing reader to crack the cover. But look how much T.S. Eliot you already know. The Wasteland may be a maddingly obscure poem sequence built around a book by Jessie Weston, but Pete Townshend used the idea in a song: "Teenage Wasteland." You know from another song that T.S. Eliot, in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" said that life was measured out in coffee spoons. We all know that Old Possum's Book of Practical...plays out dramatically in a musical titled for the last word of that book...Cats. You could have tackled (or rather relaxed with) his most famous poem sequence, Four Quartets and the accompanying readers' guide by Thomas Howard. But for all those bits of poetic imagery, you still might not stumble on the plays. I've never seen one of Eliot's plays put on, but they make wonderful reading. As an astute reviewer suggested, don't get this volume, which leaves out two of the five plays (or six if you include "Choruses from the Rock," which is not among the best). That reviewer also provided the helpful advice to track down the Faber edition which really does have all the plays. Some of them, notably Murder in the Cathedral, are available in single editions. But don't miss The Confidential Clerk, The Cocktail Party and The Elder Statesman for a great reading experience. The only other play I know that reads this well is J. M. Barrie's original play of Peter Pan. Murder in the Cathedral is notable because it falls in the Church of England (Anglican) tradition of putting on plays at the Canterbury Festival. Charles Williams also wrote plays related to this event (Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury), as did Dorothy L. Sayers (The Zeal of Thy House, The Devil to Pay). All of which is to say that there is a lot of great dramatic writing to be rediscovered as reading as well as performance (see also my review of Christopher Fry's plays A Phoenix Too Frequent and The Lady's Not for Burning). Many Sayers readers are also aware that she wrote the first radio play for the BBC on the life of Jesus (and updated it to common language), as well as essays on her experience dealing with the Gospel accounts in dramatic form. The best known of these is "The Dogma is the Drama," available in various collections.

I became familiar with Eliot's work chronologically, learning something new at each step. "Prufrock" introduced me to modern poetical structure, "The Waste Land" showed me how literary allusion can enrich verse, "Ash-Wednesday" refreshed the world of religious poetry, and the supernal "Four Quartets" was for me a metaphysical insight of the greatest beauty.Eliot is without a doubt the finest poet of the 20th century, perhaps the finest poet ever. His contributions to the poets who came after him, and to literature in general, are persistently evident. Eliot doesn't always succeed, and many of his poems seem trite and pretentious, but when he succeeds he hits dead on with poetry perfect in form, balance, and sound. There is the man here, the poet as reflected in his own work, but there is also common human experience through looking at history ("The Waste Land") and meditating on Man's relationship with the Divine and the eternal (Ariel Poems, and most of his output after 1928).HOWEVER, this edition of his "collected works," COMPLETE POEMS AND PLAYS: 1909-1950 lacks several last poems which can be found in COLLECTED POEMS 1909-1962. I recommend that edition, as tt is worth missing out on Eliot's plays in order to have a truly complete collection of his sublime verse.

In spite of the drawbacks of the arrangement in this volume (as described by other reviewers infra), this remains a must-have volume for anyone interested in contemporary poetry. T.S. Eliot's *best* works are all collected here, in a readily readable and comprehensible form. I remember reading and re-reading and re-reading my copy as a youngster and it still enjoys both a place of honor on my shelf as well as the even greater honor of frequent use and perusal. Let's face it, you can't come to terms with contemporary poetry without an understanding of T.S. Eliot, and this is probably the best place to start that effort because of the comprehensive (though not exhaustive) nature of this collection. You simply have to have this volume if you are a lover of contemporary poetry.

Even in his lifetime Eliot became a legend, a literary figure so universally praised, so enormously influential, that some of his best works, in spite of their popularity, and perhaps because of it, have been buried by the overly abusive and vulgar public. So for the several decades after his death, his dominant spirit was--had to be--combated by those who wish to break new ground. It is true that now we can see beyond Eliot, but we hardly realize that we still must begin with him, as he himself had begun the modernist tradition nearly a century ago. This book, the complete Eliot, is possibly the single most important book in modern English poetry. Reading Yeats and Eliot side by side, we cannot help but notice that Yeats, and perhaps Stevens with him, belonged to the Romantic tradition, however they masked themselves. But Eliot is different. His poetry represents something new, but at the same time something ancient, as ancient as the Greeks that he so admired. Eliot was a beginning, in the sense that Dante, his master, was a beginning. Like Freud's, Joyce's, Kafka's, and Picasso's, Eliot's voice is unique. But hardly any major poet alive today can escape it. The truth is, we talk like Eliot whenever we want to say something meaningul or "profound"; because his voice had dominated ours, just as his imagination had become part of ours.