T. S. Eliot Books

Usually I find Bloom's books very helpful in understanding difficult works and authors. However, in this collection, all the essays are geared toward more serious scholars of Eliot's works, rather than toward the general reader looking for more information. Yes, the editor includes some standard and well known essays about Eliot by the likes of Hugh Kenner, Northrop Frye, Richard Ellmann (Joyce's biographer) and some modern critics, but there is nothing that holds these essays together. It would have been better to organize the essays around particular works -- instead, we get a brief look at Ash Wednesday, a bit on the Wasteland, some other random poems, you get the idea. Many of these essays are outdated by now. If you are a graduate student writing your thesis on Eliot, these essays may be useful, but for the general high school student or adult who justs wants some help with understanding Eliot, try a more user-friendly series like the Twayne's Masterworks, or Norton Critical Editions.

I can't say very much much about this because I haven't, couldn't, read the whole thing. I'll probably come back to it, God willing. But Eliot himself said of these lectures as to why he didn't want to publish them, that they were "immature and pretentious". This, coming from me, would have sounded quite presumptuous, but from him it's rather admirable, and anyway, it's true. They are both pretentious and immature. As to the question of maturity, many of the same ideas and preoccupations would develop later. But the man who wrote the Four Quartets is still well off in the future and this is because his tangling with metaphysics up to this point had been collegiate: in courses and books. The great poems of the later years derive from the patient endurance of life as it actually is and himself as he actually was. Here in his thirties, he is a brilliant young fellow, aglow with the renown of his early successes: Prufrock and the Waste Land primarily. I only read the first four lectures - there are nine altogether; but the only message I could really discern was: I am a very clever, well-read poet with a hint of religious solemnity.
Anyway, let them, the lectures, serve as a reflection to everyone who is or was exceedingly clever that they may blush and take heart remembering that this was the man who later wrote The Four Quartets.

This book's description sparked my interest and led me to think that it would fill a gap in Eliot scholarship. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The book does not quite achieve what it sets out to do.

In a nutshell, this is a book of close reading exercises and personal reflections disguised as a long letter to a two-year old boy. It discusses three novels (Stevenson's Treasure Island, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Thomas Bernhard's The Loser) and one poem (T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) in some detail. Not exactly the kind of bedtime reading a two-year-old enjoys.

I appreciate the idea of the book and the intention behind it, but the weaknesses of the book are substantial. Most obvious is the irritating discrepancy between the author's attempt to appear talking to his two-year old son while at the same time penning sentences like "In Italy, Holden's transgression is a precursor of 1968, a sort of protest ante litteram, a proto-desecrator of the system, of the social values of his day." That is heady stuff for a two-year old, but definitely good material for an essay in the culture section of the weekly magazine for which the author writes. The tone of the book is that of a well-meaning but somewhat patronizing teacher. There is a strong "you-shouldish-ness" in the book, which erupts every so often in sentences like "You should treasure the good books, and throw away the ones which are not good." Not that this was a very sophisticated suggestion - but there are very few original ideas in the book, anyway. Mr. Cotroneo spends a lot of time recounting the story lines, which is admittedly a bit boring. At other times he indulges in some personal, and nonetheless widespread, prejudices against popular culture ("If it happens that the latest and most stupid hit record brings to your mind a fragment of Heraclitus, then it will mean that, on the cultural side, you have nothing to worry at all."), against professionals ("And remember, even lawyers, economists, and physicians can only be good lawyers, economists, and physicians if they have truly learned how to read a great poem. If they can't, they're only hacks, extremely mediocre ones.") and against small towns ("You are also struck by the measured quality [of life in a small town], from which a Baudelaire, a Radiguet, a Wilde, or a Hemingway could never have been born."). All these rather snooty statements combine to bring him across as more sententious, arrogant, and condescending than he probably is.

I am convinced Mr. Cotroneo loves his son no less than I love my own two-year old son. But what is the little guy to think of a father who boasts that "at the age of fifteen I was reading Joyce, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and much more," but claims at the same time that he has "no intention to make you [his son] into a literary mountaineer?" Mr. Controneo is all good intentions but sets a bad example himself by name-dropping Joyce, Dante, Augustinus, Borges and many other famous literary luminaries. Why, if he does not want his son to go climbing at such altitudes, does he point out the highest peaks?

The redeeming aspects of the book are the author's protectiveness of his son and his professed wish for the boy to enjoy what he does without having to feel forced to excel at it: "When you are older you will have to learn a lesson that The Loser can teach you: you must have passion and generosity of spirit to love the things that you do, without trying to obtain a result whatever the cost." When he grows up, his son will also come to understand that his father's "Letters to my Son" can be read for the most part as a monologue in which his father explains what made his life meaningful, what shaped him, and what he thinks is important in life. Very few fathers care to do that, and the little guy is privileged to have such a father. I just wish his father had not packaged all this in the form of an exhortative letter full of contradictory messages.

After almost every observation made by Hargrove in this work, I felt the need to let out a resounding cry of "DUH!!!" (not "DA" as the poet instructs).

Couldn't agree more with the above review. I found this trite, dull, and hugely uninspiring. Telling us repeatedly that Eliot was "brilliant" and constantly explicating the poems as Christian sermons is not at all helpful. Telling us that "because landscape functions as a major symbol, lack of knowledge about the actual sources, as well as insufficient or even incorrect knowledge, can distort or even reverse its symbolic import", is even less helpful -- particularly when, as it turns out, she herself gets her sources wrong (cf. the mistaken identification of the Lady in The Dry Salvages, later clarified by Helen Gardner).

If there is any merit in this book it lies in the nice little anthology of soundbites the author has gleaned from other, more able critics.

Oh, and the photos of course :p

This volume contains the raw, unedited (but translated) thoughts of Pascal. It reads sometimes like a typical first draft, albiet the first draft of a genius. However, for the average Christian wanting to learn of Pascal's perspective, the volume bogs down with logical arguments and criticisms of the day, and thus his universal themes become lost.

This CLIFFS NOTES guide to the works of T.S. Eliot may have contained a wealth of information when it was written in 1965, but so many advances have been made in Eliot studies since that this guide is now out-of-date. Since it was written, we have seen the finding of the original manuscripts of "The Waste Land," Valerie Eliot's compedium of T.S. Eliot's letters, Eliot's youth poetry, etc.

The book is heavily slanted towards "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land," so that it gives short shrift to Eliot's later works, which are among his most beautiful. "Four Quartets" is only briefly covered, and the section on "Ash Wednesday" doesn't even mention the Dantean influence that is such a large part of the work!

"The Waste Land" is covered in great detail, but most of the explication is now obviously misguided because it is mostly based on Eliot's footnotes which, after the discovery of the original drafts and Ezra Pound's comments, are now understood as something of a joke.

If you are looking for insight into the poetry of T.S. Eliot, the CLIFFS NOTES guide is not the way to go. Try one of the latest books, such as the one by Cambridge University Press.

Does this author know how to write? My 6 year old daughter can write better.

I think this booek is a good book in order to figure out what Eliot think about negativities through Christian doctrine.
Professor Hay searched the whole range of negativity from phiopsophical to christian doetrine.
She started from philoshphical appreaches in negativity to religious approaches. The whole scope of negativity include Eliot's critical doctrine to riligious principle.
this book shows Hay's perspectives about Eliot's spiritual structure ranging from negativity to affirmativity. Changing to affirmativity is achieved through earlier poem to later poetry reaching the still point, the symbol of unification to God.