In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See

Although I’ll have to confess that the more I study T.S. Eliot’s life and philosophy the more I realize why I originally rejected his poetry years ago, it is still hard to deny the pure, poetic power of his best poems. Strangely, I still love “The Hollow Men,” a poem I memorized my first year [...]

With the exception of “The Hollow Men,” most of T.S. Eliot’s poems don’t reach out and grab me, though I find myself liking them better than I did years ago when I first encountered them in college. Perhaps that’s because I no longer am pressed to explicate them in a long, tedious essay that seems [...]

While re-reading Eliot’s Collected Poems and Plays I discovered another poem besides “The Hollow Men” that I truly liked. In fact, I was surprised how much I liked “Journey of the Magi” for I’m sure if I’d seen the title in an anthology I would have skipped right over it. It’s perhaps even more surprising [...]

I’m not leaving T.S. Eliot without at least personally coming to terms with his masterpiece “The Wasteland.” There’s no denying it’s an impressive piece, surely Eliot’s “tour de force.” Even if, like me, you’re unwilling to explore the literary allusions as extensively as they demand, you immediately feel the despair implied by the title. Nor [...]