The scholars of THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE judge that T.S. Eliot's "interest in the great middle ground of human experience (as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner) [was] deficient," while also recognizing Eliot's "poetic cunning, his fine craftsmanship, his original accent, his historical and representative importance as THE poet of the modern Symbolist-Metaphysical tradition".

T.S. Eliot's conversion from Unitarianism to high-church, Catholic Anglicanism discomfited many of the secular literati. Although Eliot expresses a Christian sentiment in much of his writings and rightfully casts fascist totalitarianism as antithetic to the spirit of Christianity, Eliot's work is marred by a few unmistakable, anti-Semitic statements, displaying the effects of the spiritual darkness of the pre-WWII period leading up to Hitler's attempted, global eradication of the Jewish people.

Despite Eliot's apparent antisemitism, Paul Dean concludes that "however much Eliot may have been compromised as a person, as we all are in our several ways, his greatness as a poet remains." ( )

I’m not sure what to say about this one… yet. This book contained many of Eliot’s poems, not just The Waste Land. I found his earlier work easier on the brain. I read The Waste Land twice and though it left me with distinct images, I’m still not sure what was going on. It’s strange to thoroughly enjoy a poem and yet not really know why. The essays in the book bored me. ( )

Quotes from The Waste Land:

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

That corpse you planted last year in the garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

...throbbing between two lives,

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop and think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water

Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
--But who is that on the other side of you?

My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Shantih shantih shantih
(a formal ending to an Upanishad. "The Peace which passeth understanding" is our equivalent to this word.) ( )