{Literary Circles}[28th November 1988]

[Redbook6:41-51)][19881128:2046]{Literary Circles}[28th November 1988]

19881128.2046

Emboldened by my success with [...], I rather rashly decided to try my luck with the much more formidable T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement]* – rashly because TS Eliot [...] is a subject about which or whom I know virtually nothing: the unlikely event of publication could cause me embarrassment.**

So today I read the Collected Poems [of T.S. Eliot] 1909 – 1962 (Faber, 1974) from start to finsh; I don’t suppose I had read more than a few handfuls of lines since I [had] first read any of Eliot’s poetry: I tended to read against the self-conscious (as I see it) and referential scholarship of the better known poems. But that is the key to it: that for some reason, having to do I imagine with the developmental state of the critics themselves, almost all critical approbation (and indeed commentary) which I have come across is directed at the early poems, ie up to and sometimes including The Waste Land. From the Waste Land onwards one may hear poems read on the radio, for example, especially in religious contexts, but rarely or never do I see them analysed.

Unsurprisingly! – I have been unable to make enough sense of any of these later poems until, today, I approached them in the light of Circles Analysis: by which they make almost complete sense. (Only the theme in the case of the Waste Land, whose details for obvious reasons remain unclear to me: but even that fact makes sense to [sic] C[ircles] A[nalysis].

I only wish that I had immediate access to Eliot’s criticism and philosophy, and critical commentary by others on his work.

*[[Redbook6:36A(/40A)][19881122:0000]{T.S Eliot and Anti-Semitism}[22nd November 1988]]

**and disappointment <881209>

[continues]

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