This was a nice tactile experience. The book was published in 1932 and had apparently had a replacement binding sometime in the Nixon administration. It felt sleek in my hand.

I bought it for fifty cents as our local library continues its purge, freeing the stacks for a conference area for Rotarians and Lyft team meetings.


The volume marked a nice return to The Waste Land. I don't believe I had read Ash Wednesday before and was impressed. We all know the grief in each handful of dust. I found this observation especially poignant as this particular book was being cast out of the library. ( )

At long last, I’ve tried T. S. Eliot’s poetry.
Maybe I’ll put Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot back on the shelf, and try again after a while. Maybe not.

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men”
From “The Hollow Men,” 1925

It’s not that I mind Eliot’s deliberate contradictions so much. I’m willing to be provoked. I’m open to being tantalized. I’m ready to be pushed or pulled outside my comfort zone.

The sticky point for me, with Eliot’s poetry, is that I never seem to get to the point, or maybe I simply don’t get the point. When I get to the end of one of his longish poems, I’m really not sure where I started, or where I wandered, or where I arrived.

I find little coherence in Eliot’s words and phrases and passages.

I think of myself as a wordsmith, and I love the beauty of elegant phrases and shimmering, specific, steely, selective, stately, splendid words that tell a delicious story or evoke a bloom of emotion.

For my taste, T. S. Eliot’s poetry isn’t tasty, and it’s a bloomin’ wasteland of jumbled words, fractured images and unfinished imaginations.

If you’re wondering where all the flowers have gone, don’t look for answers in Eliot’s work.
More on my blogs:
http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/
http://historybottomlines.blogspot.com/ ( )