Select Poems
An essential collection of classic poems by the father of modernist poetry.
 
In the masterly cadence of T. S. Eliot’s verse, the twentieth century found its definitive poetic voice, an incredible “image of its accelerated grimace,” in the words of Eliot’s friend and mentor Ezra Pound. This twenty-four-poem volume is a rich collection of Eliot’s greatest works—including the classic “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—all of which unveil the desires, grievances, failures, and heart of modern humanity.
 
This collection includes “Gerontion,” “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” “Sweeney Erect,” “A Cooking Egg,” “Le Directeur,” “Mélange Adultère de Tout,” “Lune de Miel,” “The Hippopotamus,” “Dans le Restaurant,” “Whispers of Immortality,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Morning at the Window,” “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Aunt Helen,” “Cousin Nancy,” “Mr. Apollinax,” “Hysteria,” “Conversation Galante,” and “La Figlia Che Piange.
 
This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
1127643801
Select Poems
An essential collection of classic poems by the father of modernist poetry.
 
In the masterly cadence of T. S. Eliot’s verse, the twentieth century found its definitive poetic voice, an incredible “image of its accelerated grimace,” in the words of Eliot’s friend and mentor Ezra Pound. This twenty-four-poem volume is a rich collection of Eliot’s greatest works—including the classic “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—all of which unveil the desires, grievances, failures, and heart of modern humanity.
 
This collection includes “Gerontion,” “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” “Sweeney Erect,” “A Cooking Egg,” “Le Directeur,” “Mélange Adultère de Tout,” “Lune de Miel,” “The Hippopotamus,” “Dans le Restaurant,” “Whispers of Immortality,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Morning at the Window,” “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Aunt Helen,” “Cousin Nancy,” “Mr. Apollinax,” “Hysteria,” “Conversation Galante,” and “La Figlia Che Piange.
 
This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
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Select Poems

Select Poems

by T. S. Eliot
Select Poems

Select Poems

by T. S. Eliot

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Overview

An essential collection of classic poems by the father of modernist poetry.
 
In the masterly cadence of T. S. Eliot’s verse, the twentieth century found its definitive poetic voice, an incredible “image of its accelerated grimace,” in the words of Eliot’s friend and mentor Ezra Pound. This twenty-four-poem volume is a rich collection of Eliot’s greatest works—including the classic “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—all of which unveil the desires, grievances, failures, and heart of modern humanity.
 
This collection includes “Gerontion,” “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar,” “Sweeney Erect,” “A Cooking Egg,” “Le Directeur,” “Mélange Adultère de Tout,” “Lune de Miel,” “The Hippopotamus,” “Dans le Restaurant,” “Whispers of Immortality,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Morning at the Window,” “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Aunt Helen,” “Cousin Nancy,” “Mr. Apollinax,” “Hysteria,” “Conversation Galante,” and “La Figlia Che Piange.
 
This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781504050173
Publisher: Open Road Media
Publication date: 01/09/2018
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 65
Sales rank: 9,867
File size: 1 MB

About the Author

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri. He moved to England in 1914 and published his first book of poems in 1917. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 and is best known for his masterpiece The Waste Land.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Gerontion

  Thou hast nor youth nor age
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!'
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering Judas,
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last We have not reached conclusion, when I Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last I have not made this show purposelessly And it is not by any concitation Of the backward devils.
These with a thousand small deliberations Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
  Tenants of the house,
Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar

  Tra-la-la-la-la-la-laire — nil nisi divinum stabile
Burbank crossed a little bridge Descending at a small hotel;
Defunctive music under sea Passed seaward with the passing bell Slowly: the God Hercules Had left him, that had loved him well.

The horses, under the axletree Beat up the dawn from Istria With even feet. Her shuttered barge Burned on the water all the day.

But this or such was Bleistein's way:
A lustreless protrusive eye Stares from the protozoic slime At a perspective of Canaletto.
Declines. On the Rialto once.
Princess Volupine extends A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights,
Klein. Who clipped the lion's wings And flea'd his rump and pared his claws?
Sweeney Erect

  And the trees about me,
Paint me a cavernous waste shore Cast in the unstilted Cyclades,
Display me Aeolus above Reviewing the insurgent gales Which tangle Ariadne's hair And swell with haste the perjured sails.

Morning stirs the feet and hands
This withered root of knots of hair Slitted below and gashed with eyes,
Jackknifes upward at the knees Then straightens out from heel to hip Pushing the framework of the bed And clawing at the pillow slip.

Sweeney addressed full length to shave Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,
(The lengthened shadow of a man Is history, said Emerson Who had not seen the silhouette Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).

Tests the razor on his leg Waiting until the shriek subsides.

The epileptic on the bed Curves backward, clutching at her sides.
Observing that hysteria Might easily be misunderstood;
But Doris, towelled from the bath,
A Cooking Egg

  En l'an trentiesme de mon age
Pipit sat upright in her chair
Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,
• * *

I shall not want Honour in Heaven
I shall not want Capital in Heaven
I shall not want Society in Heaven,
I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:
• * *

But where is the penny world I bought
Where are the eagles and the trumpets?

  Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.
Le Directeur

Malheur à la malheureuse Tamise!
Mélange Adultère de Tout

En Amerique, professeur;
On montrera mon cénotaphe Aux côtes brulantes de Mozambique.

Lune de Miel

Ils ont vu les Pays-Bas, ils rentrent à Terre Haute;
Ils vont prendre le train de huit heures Prolonger leurs misères de Padoue à Milan Ou se trouvent le Cène, et un restaurant pas cher.
The Hippopotamus

  Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos, ut
    S. IGNATII AD TRALLIANOS.

  And when this epistle is read among you, cause
The broad-backed hippopotamus Rests on his belly in the mud;
Flesh-and-blood is weak and frail,
The hippo's feeble steps may err In compassing material ends,
The 'potamus can never reach The mango on the mango-tree;
At mating time the hippo's voice Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
The hippopotamus's day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
I saw the 'potamus take wing Ascending from the damp savannas,
Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
He shall be washed as white as snow,
Dans le Restaurant

Le garçon délabré qui n'a rien à faire Que de se gratter les doigts et se pencher sur mon épaule:
  Mais alors, vieux lubrique, à cet âge ...
Mais alors, tu as ton vautour!

Va t'en te décrotter les rides du visage;
Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé,
Whispers of Immortality

Webster was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin;
Daffodil bulbs instead of balls Stared from the sockets of the eyes!
Donne, I suppose, was such another Who found no substitute for sense;
• * *

Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye Is underlined for emphasis;
The couched Brazilian jaguar Compels the scampering marmoset With subtle effluence of cat;
The sleek Brazilian jaguar Does not in its arboreal gloom Distil so rank a feline smell As Grishkin in a drawing-room.

And even the Abstract Entities Circumambulate her charm;
Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service

Look, look, master, here comes two religious caterpillars.
Polyphiloprogenitive The sapient sutlers of the Lord Drift across the window-panes.
In the beginning was the Word.
A painter of the Umbrian school Designed upon a gesso ground The nimbus of the Baptized God.
But through the water pale and thin Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set The Father and the Paraclete.

• * *

The sable presbyters approach The avenue of penitence;
Under the penitential gates Sustained by staring Seraphim Where the souls of the devout Burn invisible and dim.

Along the garden-wall the bees With hairy bellies pass between The staminate and pistilate,
Sweeney shifts from ham to ham Stirring the water in his bath.
Sweeney Among the Nightingales

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].

Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The circles of the stormy moon Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Gloomy Orion and the Dog Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
Slips and pulls the table cloth Overturns a coffee-cup,
The silent man in mocha brown Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The silent vertebrate in brown Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
She and the lady in the cape Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Leaves the room and reappears Outside the window, leaning in,
The host with someone indistinct Converses at the door apart,
And sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud,
(Continues…)



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