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Jul 08, 2019Waluconis rated this title 4 out of 5 stars
This was Eliot's first major publication after his formally joining the Anglican Church. The poetry has the same imagery and stately language of his previous poems, but this seems a little less intense. The poems are a wonderful intellectual exercise, but I thought did not quite have the same passion and intensity as his earlier poems. Eliot was at heart an aesthete. He posed as an Englishman, and this, along with Thomas Beckett's portrayal in "Murder in the Cathedral,"cause one to wonder about the reasons for his "conversion". These poems feel like Eliot putting to rest some things that he had been living wither a long while. Gone is the poet who said we are "in rat's alley where the dead men lose their bones". After this came a sort of new Eliot and "Book of Practical Cats", which eventually after his death made it to Broadway. That path doesn't seem likely for "The Waste Land" and "Ash Wednesday", but these days, who knows? I read my copy in his Collected Works.