Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Centenary Edition)

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Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Centenary Edition)

by T.S. Eliot

4.32 · rating details · 2,570 ratings · 65 reviews

There is no more authoritative collection of the poetry that Eliot himself wished to preserve than this volume, published two years before his death in 1965. Poet, dramatist, critic, and editor, T. S. Eliot was one of the defining figures of twentieth-century poetry. This edition of Collected Poems 1909-1962 includes his verse from Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) t...more

Hardcover, 240 pages

Published September 25th 1963 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (first published 1963)

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Oct 19, 2011

Norman Xavier rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: poesía, literatura-norteamericana

Me gustó la forma de escribir similar al collage de Eliot, de cierta forma lo asocié a mi propia escritura y por eso me acerque a esta recopilación de textos. Eliot definitivamente fue un gran poeta y sus Cuatro Cuartetos son la muestra definitiva de ello, aunque en Tierra Baldía o Miércoles de Ceniza se pueden encontrar también pruebas de la lucidez de Eliot al escribir. Le puse tres por que a momentos el tono religioso que adquiere su poesía la vuelve aburrida y pierde rasgos vanguardistas com...more

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Jan 05, 2008

Joe rated it

Way too much here for a real review, but I had to write something about the volume that's been my tattered, marked-up, much-loved companion for twelve years now. I feel Eliot's ache for transcendence, his paralyzing frustration at the limitations of language to communicate the depths of our souls. And yet he did it better than anyone ever has. It's intellectual, yes, but it's from an intellectual perpetually pushing across into the visceral, never quite unifying it all fully, and knowing that...more

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Aug 04, 2011

Jacob Aitken added it

Good theology can be iconic. And being iconic it is poetic. It is an icon put in words. It is like faithful hermeneutics. The Patristics were accused of Platonizing and allegorizing. Not so. Despite all their excesses, they saw (better than the academic professor today) that the Bible yearns to break through with new meaning and simple, surface level interpretations are not enough.

Not to diminish literal interpretation, but not to exalt it either.

T.S. Eliot is probably the supreme exam...more

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Jul 28, 2011

Peycho Kanev rated it

Shelves: poetry

Critics of Eliot damn his work for its difficulties - and one cannot deny that its complicated diversions into technical and structural experimentation, mythical reference and multilingual commentary do initially intimidate. The beauty of Eliot's poetry is that it grows with you. 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 o...more

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Feb 03, 2010

Taka rated it

Shelves: japan_jul07-aug10, modernist_lit

Don't really know--

I have a mixed feeling about Eliot's poems. I found his Prufrock impenetrable, The Wasteland annoying, frustrating, and mostly incomprehensible, Ash Wednesday somewhat interesting in parts but too heavily religious. His The Hollow Men, however, resonated with me in all its haunting and chilling overtones. Ariel Poems, Minor Poems, Unfinished Poems were all meh (and can anyone explain to me what the hell's going on in his eerily Beckett-esque Sweeney's Agonistes?!?!...more

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Oct 10, 2011

James Murphy rated it

I've spent my life reading Eliot. When I was a high school junior I had a teacher who turned me on to poetry. She showed me the truth in Sandburg, but I soon discovered Eliot on my own. A story I still love to tell is how I spent the summer of my 17th year walking around with a library copy of Eliot's poems under my arm. A cousin asked me, "You're not reading that stuff, are you?" Well, I was and still am.

My copy of Collected Poems was the second hardcover book I ever ...more

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Nov 08, 2011

Eric Sonnenschein rated it

TS ELIOT AND WALLACE STEVENS: A CONTRAST BETWEEN TWO OBLIVIOUS POETS

There are basically two kinds of poets, those who want you to understand and those who don't care. The difference between the poetry they make is simple. The accessible poet writes foremost to communicate, to put himself out there for you the reader to learn from, to like or to dislike. He has a story to tell and uses verse to tell it. Even when he employs obscure terms, they are like rare ornaments or odd acc...moreTS ELIOT AND WALLACE STEVENS: A CONTRAST BETWEEN TWO OBLIVIOUS POETS

There are basically two kinds of poets, those who want you to understand and those who don't care. The difference between the poetry they make is simple. The accessible poet writes foremost to communicate, to put himself out there for you the reader to learn from, to like or to dislike. He has a story to tell and uses verse to tell it. Even when he employs obscure terms, they are like rare ornaments or odd accessories to a central character and location that are easy to identify. With the accessible poet you know how he feels about his subject and how he wants you to feel about it; when you read his verse, you usually know where you are. Allen Ginsberg, Wilfred Owen, Carl Sandberg, EA Houseman, and Robert Frost were accessible poets. WB Yeats was accessible most of the time, until he sailed to Byzantium and slouched toward Bethlehem, and spoke to us about a perne in a gyre. But even in his most mystical, astrologically driven moments, Yeats is fairly easy to locate. He likes to tell a story.

The oblivious poet also writes about a subject, but the reader quickly realizes that what he is reading is not what the poem is about, the words are figures, signifiers that are as far from the signified as the earth is from Alpha Centauri. And then the reader makes another uneasy discovery that may make him queasy: he doesn't know how he wil ever understand this poem. That is because the words and statements of these poets are like the short-cuts on a computer desk-top. They link you to real files, but only if those files actually exist in your hard drive. The problem is they usually don't. Those points of reference, those short-cuts, exist only in the poet's memory. And unless you, the reader, can somehow access the poet's mind and experience, you will not be able to recover that point of reference. Therefore, you will have no way of understanding or emotionally connecting with that poet. TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens are such poets as these.

Of course, it would be unfair to simply say that Eliot and Stevens are arcane and enigmatic and not worth the trouble of reading. In fact, both poets demonstrate just how little we need to understand a poem in order to be seduced by it. Maybe we like poetry because it points out flamboyantly a property of even the most mundane communication: we talk, we listen, but we are never quite sure of what our interlocutor has said and how much we understood. Yet, we continue to talk and listen--why? For the pleasure of communication, of the words pouring on our ears and into my minds and hearts. And also for the time and effort we spend remembering the bits and pieces of what was said and the fun of putting it back together into something coherent and comforting. When Stevens asks Ramon Hernandez why the singing ended and why the lights in the boats marked off the dark water of the harbor as if creating a Cartesian grid, we also want to know. We want to know what things mean, we also want to believe that the cosmos has a pattern.

In imploring Ramon for some key to what he senses, Stevens comes as close as any poet can without crashing on the rocks of prose to explaining the life-long objective of his career in verse: to find God, a universal soul or spirit, or intelligence behind the apparently random beauty and horror in the cosmos. Stevens can lose us with his blackbirds and his uncle's monocle and when he tells me that "life is a bitter aspic" I want to tell him to send it back to the kitchen with a footnote.

But for every obscurantist poem of Stevens there is a beautifully clear and evocative one, like Martial Cadenza" or "The Dwarf." Stevens is always trying to solve a problem and even if he is sometimes like the mumbling math genius professor who scrawls inscrutable symbols on a blackboard in impossibly dense equations only to erase parts of them while we look on, he does so with such an unerring placement of words and sounds and such sincerity that we cannot help but try to go along with him on his adventure.

We as readers and consumers of stories and explorers of science also wish to understand the world around us. We look to the poet to tell us something about it. TS Eliot was that unique poet who did not really care about telling us anything about our world. He did not seem to share our need to understand the world he lived in and his poetry reflects this purposeful dismissal of our expectations. He understood the world all too well and it disgusted him. It was a world in which he did not fit in. It was a world in which nobody seemed to be fitting in. It was a world in which humanity seemed to be blossoming like one large teeming larval army. It was a world of Coney Island, canned food, and Model Ts, of factories and immigrants for whom his erudition and eloquence might as well have been on the other side of a black hole.

TS Eliot was not nearly as comfortable as Wallace Stevens in his skin or in his home or on his street. He did not feel like a master of his environment. He could not tell us about Key West or Naples or Paris or his stately house. He was not someone trying to make sense of a world of intriguing phenomena--he'd given up on that. The best he could do was to try to deal with his debased environment with satire, sarcasm and an elegiac eloquence that often comes off as faintly romantic, except that the romance is about something without name or reference. That eloquence, as hypnotic at times as an oyster's saliva, can turn Eliot's anguish and irritation about the low quality of life around him into a pearl of linguistic beauty. For him, poetry is a victory over billboards, bad music and degraded values. It is how he turns it all into something resembling art.

At times, Eliot uses his wit and erudition like a hammer. He bludgeons "the young man carbuncular" and others with his grand diction. Eliot was deprived of finer things. He would have been an angry young man, but his education and Anglo-Saxon sense of class superiority and entitlement made him unfit for soapboxes and the vulgarity of politics. In any case he did not have much good to say and wanted to steer clear of stating his case or explaining himself for fear that his "message" might not be more than a well-articulated shout of disgust and despair.

He gives us J Alfred Prufrock,the Wasteland, Sweeney and The Nightingales, The Hollow Men and Gerontian because he wants to speak without making a statement, to attack without committing to conquest. He wants to smother his grievance in lacquer and does not want us to be pinned down to particulars. Eliot may have started in a very similar place to Stevens, but rather than enjoying the world in an Epicurian way, he sank into its depths. While Stevens could permit himself to meditate on the dark conundrum of beauty and ugliness, life and death, Eliot could only make snide comments about it. His only way out was religion and he found it. Then his poetry calms down, becomes simply sad and dignified.(less)

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Jan 25, 2008

Paul rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: poooooooooeeeettttrrrreeeeeeeeeeeee

What the hell does this mean? Anybody?

SWEENEY AMONG THE NIGHTINGALES

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.

The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the hornèd gate.

Gloomy Orion and the Dog
Are veiled; and hushed th...more

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Sep 01, 2007

Chuck Lowry rated it

Shelves: readoveralonglifetime

Poetry is funny stuff. Either you "get" it or you don't. And there are as many different kinds of poetry as there are of prose, and what differs in style and form can convey a simlar message, and vice versa.

T. S. Eliot has some lovely pieces that can be read on their own, with pleasure and profit, things like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or The Boston Evening Transcript or things like that. The key, though, is to read enough of Eliot to ascertain not only the atti...more

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Jun 22, 2011

James rated it

· review of another edition

Quite simply, this collection is one of the best books I have ever read. 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', 'The Waste Land', 'Ash Wednesday' and 'Four Quartets' are among my favourite poems- they have a complexity of thought and imagery which can be possessed only by great works of poetry, and have led me to meditate on their meaning for much time. Read them, and I'm sure you'll enjoy them as much as I have and find a new intellectual rigour to your understanding of life and reality.

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Nov 24, 2010

DoctorM rated it

Shelves: favourites, modern-lit, poetry

I've had various copies of this over the years. And here's how it works: I will always have a copy of Eliot's complete poems on my bookshelf. Every city, every university, every town, every career--- I'll always have "The Waste Land" and "The Four Quartets" and "Ash Wednesday" and "Choruses From the Rock" there ready to hand. I can't imagine being without Tom Eliot's voice and words nearby.

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Mar 13, 2009

Tressa rated it

My copy of this little book is also battered and worn with notes written throughout the margins.

Yes, some of his images are a little over the top, but the poems that are slam dunks such as "Journey of the Magi," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Whispers of Immortality," and The Waste Land are wonderful and do connect with many people.

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Feb 04, 2010

Cynthia rated it

It's been the strangest thing, but for days stray bits of Eliot had been popping up in my conversation. (Don't worry. I sounded less dorky than working Eliot in would imply.) In an effort to get him out of my system, I picked this up again. Yep, he's still fantastic. And that's not just hometown St. Louis pride talking.

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Feb 26, 2009

Briana rated it

Shelves: inklings, books-that-make-me-insane

REALLY WEIRD. Garlic and sapphires! Eliot has a lot of...rather abstract imagery...argh. I seriously don't think I got the point of what Eliot was saying...my mind is probably just not deep enough. I do like the way he writes, though...If I understood it, I would probably love it. But I don't. So I can't.

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Jun 23, 2011

Efseine rated it

Shelves: best-beloved, 2008

Despite the fact that T.S. Eliot was a (likely) anti-Semitic asshole, and the utterly impenetrable pretension of "The Waste Land," his poetry has a rhythm that speaks directly to all the things I love about the written word. I'm not much for poetry, but "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a masterpiece.

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Dec 06, 2011

Bee rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: to-reread, quasi-autobiographical

An excellent collection. <3

My only quibble is that one of my favourites, The Hollow Men, doesn't appear inside.

...Well, except if you write it out on a separate sheet of paper and tuck it into the back. But that was an improvement by me, so I'm not sure that counts. :)

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Mar 29, 2009

Quazi rated it

My only disappointment with this collection is that it does not include the poems from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

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Jan 11, 2008

Donna added it

Shelves: poetry, nobel-prize

I haven't read poetry for a few months, and enjoyed the
escapism of the wordplay here. Here's one of my favourite passages,
from a poem titled "Burnt Norton from Four Quartets." (You must read
it aloud to get the full effect.)

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
R...more

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Oct 07, 2009

Cindy rated it

I use this edition of Eliot's poetry nearly every day. Easy type to read, and organized well. The pages are nice and thick and it is just a pleasure to peruse and to refer to ... and for some reason, Eliot's poetry fills in the blanks my mind leaves in my thoughts.

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Jun 19, 2011

Barbara rated it

I have to read T.S. Eliot at least once a year. His poetry takes my breath away. I love his use of personification, imagery and metaphor. "Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky..."

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Feb 07, 2012

Courtney rated it

I'm loving TS Eliot's poems. Like every other high school English student, I read and adored Prufrock and the Waste Land (listen to him read it - hauntingly eerie), but left his other work mostly untouched.

I'm happy now that I'm rediscovering him. The poems are more melodic as a whole than most other collections I've read, very fluid and full of awesome sound-energy. I find myself turning off even low music in the background so that I can read them out loud to myself (nerd alert...more

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Aug 06, 2011

Brandon Koontz added it

Absolutely one of my favorite poets. If you've never read Eliot, this book is the place to start...He's a bit of a mind-you-know-what at first, but well worth it.

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Aug 12, 2010

Tiff rated it

Not understanding Eliot is no reason not to read his works. It's amazing what he can do with words.

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Apr 08, 2009

Kelsey rated it

Beautiful. "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" and "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" are my absolute favorites.

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Mar 11, 2009

Alison rated it

I love this guy. Even though he's hard to get it has always been worth the study for me.

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Apr 03, 2010

Sam rated it

Shelves: poetry

Eliot completely captures the imagination and takes it on wonderful journeys.

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Oct 22, 2011

Marg rated it

Shelves: poetry

Without Pound, it might have been "April is not a very nice month...."

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Sep 27, 2011

Anita Joy rated it

· review of another edition

Recommends it for: poetry and modernism fans

Shelves: poetry, favourites

A must-read for any appreciators of poetry and/or Modernism!

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Dec 22, 2010

Lisa rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: poetry

I discovered T.S. Eliot when I was at university. At first I was completely bemused by The Wasteland and preferred the 'easy ones' in the Prufrock collection, but as I came to understand the symbolism and allusions, I learned to love The Wasteland and to greatly admire the genius of the poet who wrote it.

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Jul 10, 2009

Deb rated it

We read and discussed some short poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, and The Four Quartets for our "literary circle. Reading Eliot is mindbending, and I highly recommend discussing his poetry with a teenager. I learned as much from the teenager's perspectives and insights as I did from reading and studying the poems myself.

http://bookconscious.wordpress.com/2009/...

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About T.S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and t...more

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Quotes from Collected Poems 1909-1962

“music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but
you are the music
While the music lasts.” — 21 people liked it

“You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you-
Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar!” — 17 people liked it

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Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Centenary Edition)

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