Just back from a tremendous week in the Caribbean. By way of a Poetry Post, here’s a review of a new book on T. S. Eliot that seems relevant and interesting. The idea of “the buried life” seems central to Eliot–perhaps, in some ways, to all of us in the Hollow Men. –Shotts
Books of The Times
A Devoted Tour Guide to a Desert of a Soul
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 16, 2007
T. S. ELIOT
By Craig Raine
202 pages. Oxford University Press. $21.
In a culture that now seems long ago and far, far away, T. S. Eliot was a rock star. The poet made the cover of Time magazine in 1950, and several years later, 14,000 people turned out in Minneapolis to listen to him talk about “The Frontiers of Criticism.†Modernism was the ruling aesthetic inside and outside academe, Eliot was one of its high priests, and his most famous poem, “The Waste Land,†was hailed not only for its groundbreaking technique and glittering shards of language, but also for its difficulty — its density, its allusiveness, its recondite knowledge.
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