Poetry Thursday: TS Eliot!

[@ericdavis5791]

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, Sweeney Among the Nightingales, The Hollow Men, and Journey of the Magi are my favorites from Eliot. Prufrock was huge in getting me into poetry.

[@juliemartin6101]

I have liked Eliot for a long time. This was an enjoyable commentary on his work, and on him. My favorite work of his is Four Quartets, but there are parts of almost everything that I enjoy.

[@ThatReadingGuy28]

I haven't read much of Eliot but I love Prufrock so much that this past month I resolved to memorize it. What fun that was! Now I recite it daily in my head.

[@duffypratt]

For me, Eliot’s entire process is laid out in a single line at the end of The Waste Land: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” It’s one he never seriously departs from (except perhaps in the Cat book). Since he largely steals his fragments from our cultural history, I find a richness in his poetry that’s lacking in the ones you will be excoriating (those destroyed by madness). I also have the sense that Eliot desperately wanted to be the modern Dante, but knew he wasn’t up to the task, and unfortunately chose Pound for his Virgil.

[@elizabethpower7897]

Personally, I enjoyed these poems because I think it gives you just enough of a very specific image image to be more intrigued about what else might be going on… I love how specific and sort bleak it is. I need to know more, Eliot, if only for one of my dearest friends, who likes him so much that my name for her in my phone is “T.S. Elliot“ And thank you for teaching me the word “integumentary” today!

[@davidnovakreadspoetry]

You did Eliot justice.

[@garethreeves6090]

When it comes to originality and memorable phrasing, I think his greatness is incontestable, but I find it fascinating that you don't get along with his work yet love biographies of him. I'm the opposite: I find the man quite dull/objectionable in comparison with the poet (ignoring Old Possum's Book of Cats). If I had a louder voice and more confidence, I'd try to recite Prufrock from memory on BookTube. No! I'm not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be...

[@saintdonoghue]

Sometimes, with me, the urge to read biographies and critical studies of a figure (or any nonfiction they themselves wrote) is a prelude to me coming to like their fiction (or drama, or verse) … I don’t know yet if that’ll happen with Eliot …

[@garethreeves6090]

@@saintdonoghue prelude - I see what you did there! 😉

[@heathergregg9975]

Steve the Modernist!! Ah well, at least you're not Virginia Woolf, having to break your back putting Eliot's lines into typeset. I hadn't realised that Eliot had visited the Brattle bookshop before... but there's a recurring melancholy use of the phrase "vacant lots". He doesn't mention the book trolleys, but that would be making it a bit obvious, I suppose.

[@saintdonoghue]

I used to be constantly tripping over him out in the sale lot!

[@heathergregg9975]

perhaps your constant kicking is the source of his "anger" which other scholars haven't picked up on. You are a footnote in the great pantheon of 20th century literature.@@saintdonoghue

[@kerrytusc]

Thanks!

[@elcastillo92]

are you possible referencing Allen Ginsberg's Howl by that date? 😆😆

[@saintdonoghue]

I know I’ve said it a million times before, but: Gawd, I love my viewers

[@omnipotentpoobah60]

Not sure much post WW2 20th century poetry will survive apart from Larkin. The further away we get from the period the more obvious that becomes. I keep forgetting that Eliot is claimed by Americans. He is of course American. He belongs to the Boomers tho - The Waste Land remains important, but largely unloved. I suspect Thomas Stearns will go the same way.