Reading TS Elliot

I first read TS Elliot years ago, perhaps in high school.  Then a few years ago on a cruise, I picked up the TS Elliot collected poems and re-read them.  I realized that TS Elliot’s poetry had deeply affected my unique poetic voice.

As part of a Writing com book review club, I am writing one book review per month,  this month’s prompt was to read and write about an award-winning writer.

TS Elliot won the Nobel Prize in literature and richly deserved it,

My Favorites

I suppose my favorite poems are his Cat poems.  I have written a lot of Cat poems myself as I have long been fascinated by cats, seeing them as alien creatures perhaps from another dimension.

My favorites were “The Naming of Cats”  and “Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer.”

Among the other poems I liked were “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock  “Gerontion” which is a reflection on getting old.  I can relate to being 67 years young, ‘Whispers of Immortality.”  And “Lines for an Old Man”.

The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Man” were difficult to really grasp but powerful and moving and well just strange poems.   My favorite lines are:

“April is the cruelest month,  breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

memory and desire, stirring dull roots

with spring rain.”

Among the plays, I liked “Murder in the Cathedral the best .” and “Family Reunion “

For more on TS Elliot here’s a link to the Wikipedia page

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic, and editor.[2] Considered one of the 20th century’s major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. Through his trials in language, writing style, and verse structure, he reinvigorated English poetry. He also dismantled outdated beliefs and established new ones through a collection of critical essays.[3]

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there.[4] He became a British citizen in 1927 at the age of 39 and renounced his American citizenship.[5]

Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from 1914 to 1915, which, at the time of its publication, was considered outlandish.[6] It was followed by The Waste Land (1922), “The Hollow Men” (1925), “Ash Wednesday” (1930), and Four Quartets (1943).[7] He was also known for seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T._S._Eliot

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