A review by amnah_a
The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot

5.0

I usually try my best to separate the art from the artist but it proved a TAD difficult to divorce the age-obsessed, cynical-turned-spiritually-awakened male speakers in these poems from the poet that represents most of these depressing characteristics. The more bigoted I discovered this man was, the narrower my eyes grew to preserve my ignorance. How could I conceal my enjoyment of his beautiful, existential, sing-song words? How can I, a 20-year-old girl, relate so much to the most terrifying, unnecessary and pathetic of God's creations: a man having a midlife crisis?

Turns out that my silly little mind is easily seduced by words. These lines in particular won me over:

[...] Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.'

- Gerontion

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; ...

- The Waste Land

'All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, [...]
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?'

- 'The Rock'

Wasn't a fan of the post-conversion poems... the mental-breakdown era was more to my taste