TS Eliot Selected Prose and Understanding Poetry

Time Magazine called Eliot the greatest English language poet of the 20th century. I have read Alfred Prufrock, but not The Waste Land - his masterpiece. In this collection of prose, however, the greatest value I derive is the confirmation that a poem has many more meanings than can be interpreted rationally. A poem is a poem precisely because the whole is more than the sum of the denotations of words strung together to fit a conventional form. Form is employed to establish order and reproduce on paper a series of moods, emotions, and evocations. Inevitably, when the rational mind is used to understand the representation of emotional expression, it finds itself uncertain and tentative. There is a sense that not all has been understood when reading poetry. There is an even greater sense of inadequacy when the attempt is made to communicate what was supposed to be understood. Reading Eliot as the literary critic, however, gives comfort that the reader can understand a poem at a deep, emotional level, yet find it difficult to articulate what has been understood.