Inexhaustible ferocity. Eliot denies the contemporaneous rejection of rhyme and meter as a decadent vestige of bygone poetry and, instead, reconfigures prosody onto prosaic form. You read "Burnt Norton" and realize that much of what Eliot writes can be conceived as sentences, as prose, and yet his language burns and burns and burns until language becomes a problematized clarification of itself: quotes recontextualize, the past/present/future of English blooms, and beauty of pre-20th century poetry meets the jagged brittleness of post-symbolist catastrophe. His whole career is dominated by a sense of genius, of an oracle recognizing the crises and dreams of his era and beyond. Reading "Four Quartets" astonishes me. So much of it reads as if Eliot sees us. It is as if he is alongside us, bearing witness to climate apocalypse, to our inability to overcome the collisions of temporality. Unabashedly some of the greatest work ever produced in the English language. It moves you so. It's a body of work that aches with curiosity, autoanalysis, and a pining for a culture to escape decline. Prufrock/The Wasteland/Four Quartets are the bare essentials, but much of the rest does not disappoint.

Worth noting that I didn't read all 1000 pages of critical commentary attached to this (though that was all done brilliantly).

I did not finish this book, nor am I likely to, at least not in one sitting. I do not think it was written for that purpose. Opened it to find a reference, fell into the commentary and only managed to rescue myself an hour later, emerging from the endless cross-references and quotations from letters, remarks, and assorted writings, in a dream-like state. For enthusiasts of T.S. Eliot this is a godsend.