Prerna's Reviews > Collected Poems, 1909-1962

Sue me. I think T S Eliot was a petulant whiner. Go ahead, call me a philistine. Because the truth is, I hated this collection. This is a huge confession for me because I've obsessed over T S Eliot's writing all my life. During my undergrad days, I often read his poetry for comfort and joyously thought "dude gets it." I was convinced that no person, alive or dead, could ever articulate the essence of the gruelling modern human condition better than T S Eliot. But now I'm in my mid-twenties and I've seen too many things, especially in the past two years, and I'm so done with lamentations for lost 'meaning.'

The only reason I'm giving this book three stars is because I understand its literary merit and because I've enjoyed many of these poems individually at various phases of my life. But when I read all of them collectively, I could no longer deny that this was mostly an old, privileged man complaining about life, loss of spirituality (whatever that means), modernity and change.

I think what bothered me the most was the fact that Eliot seemed to bestow people with an agency that we don't really possess - he seems to be of the opinion that as a species, we are entirely capable of attaining spiritual enlightenment (again, whatever that means) but choose not to simply because we are lazy. Ugh.

Eliot is a master of metaphor and therefore, by extension, a master of language. His ingenuity shines through in his use of poetical forms, references to eclectic texts and of course in his use of words as mere tools to associate disparate ideas seamlessly. I only wish he wouldn't whine so much.