The first two poems of this collection -- "Burnt Norton" and "East Coker" -- are among the greatest extended poems written in English in the 20th Century, or in any other century for that matter. The last two -- "The Dry Salvages" and "Little Gidding" -- contain, hands down, some of the worst episodes ever produced by any major poet, though these should by no means be included amongst the worst poems. The sins these later poems share in common are the related ones of flagging inspiration and patchiness, both of which can be seen as having their root in Eliot's attempt to take the 5-part prototype of "Burnt Norton," the first of the bunch to be written, and to will the others into being by using it as their model. If, however, this is failure, then we should all be so fortunate to be such failures.

Anyway, despite obvious flaws, "Four Quartets" is one of the landmarks of modernist poetry. Basically, the poems are meditations on time and eternity and, most importantly, the excruciatingly difficult task of trying to attain a little "consciousness" therein. Those, however, who feel no great kinship with philosophical poetry -- who indeed feel that poetry should express "no ideas, except in things," are perhaps never going to warm up to this collection. For those, on the other hand, who believe that poetry is one of the primary tools for grappling with the verities, then what else can I say except pounce on this collection? Oh, it's going to take many readings, much time and a great deal of thinking to plummet the furthest recesses of this profoundly great art, but then again what more could you ask for from poetry?

By the way, if you've never heard the recordings of Eliot reading these works, then you simply haven't lived.

By far the crowning of T.S. Eliot's poetry. The evanescent equilibrium point between a whole set of couples of antagons. The present is such a point, but demultiplied by a myriad of other couples. Past-Future, Has-been-Might-have-been, and this point is movement, constantly moving between those antagons. It gives you a vertigo, the vertigo we feel in front of the present that is a constantly moving equilibrium point. Fascinating. Men are no longer hollow but they are unstoppable motion. They are some light, fine and fuzzy moving line between all the antagons of human nature, of nature as for that. Then a long and rich metaphor of life with the sea, neverending movement that ignores past and future but is pure present and nothing else. Men and women can only worship this everlasting present motion, time and place that is no time, no place and no motion, just unstable energy burnt in its own existence.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

This, quite frankly, is the best poem of the 20th century, and it gets better everytime you read it. From the apparent darkness of the first stanzas of Burnt Norton to the broadening towards lucidity of the last lines, there is much to love, much to admire, and much to quote. You will find lines that speak to the heart directly: you will also find, after numerous readings, splendid little details, which reveal the craftiness with which Eliot handled this superb adieu - for it is the last great work in poetry he has written. The greatest achieve of Eliot in Four Quartets, is the way he manages to reach out to the greatest poet in history, who lived a number of centuries ago, and have the language speak with his tongue, simultaneously admitting that Dante's world view cannot be copied in today's world - but that does not mean that his form of structure and vivid allusions should not be employed: in this poem, the Trecento and the century of the atomic bomb have found common ground to behold each other as not quite congenial, yet deeply related brothers. The past is not dead - it's not even past yet.

"Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow" is a collection of poems by Ted Hughes. The copyright page notes that the book was first published in 1972. This is a remarkable book that often reads like some apocryphal sacred text. The book is dominated by its title character, who is the focus of a significant number of the poems. Crow is a multifaceted character with mythic heft: he is a warrior, theologian, trickster, and partner with God in creation. He is both heroic and ridiculous, foolish and wise. He's a compelling and delightful character who ultimately transcends all cultures and historical eras.

The collection as a whole is whimsical, witty, apocalyptic, bold, revelatory, irreverent, visceral, horrific, and playful. At times, Hughes' poetic marriage of the earthy and the mystical reminded me of Walt Whitman. The book also calls to mind traditional Native American animal stories.

Many of the poems in "Crow" touch on the magic and power of words. The natural world is another key recurring motif. Hughes delivers some striking images and some interesting arrangements of words on the page--many poems really engage the eye. Many poems read like religious litanies. Overall, an impressive and enjoyable poetic achievement.

...The gist of it was this: Crow is one of the best books of poetry published in the last 50 years...

A brilliant work! Honest, straightforward, raw and hardcore poems
that will knock your socks off. This is the only work I recommend reading by Hughes.

In my opinion, Philip Levine is perhaps the most honest poet writing in America today. As a master's candidate in an English department, I've endured much of the post-modern fluff that dominates modern poetry. In Levine's work, you won't find the typical introspective ramblings of the depressed modern poet. Levine approaches life in clear and distinct terms. There are images in these poems with ideas showing right through. Levine doesn't resort to petty academic parlor tricks to describe the disappearence of self--check out "Silent in America" for a portrait of a man with a voice so powerful that he cannot even use it.

Of prosody, Levine is also a master. These are not your basic "skinny prose" modern free verse poems. One will find design here with artfully buried rhymes and off rhymes. Levine also experiments quite successfully with both meter and syllabic verse. The amazine thing, however, is that unless you really pay attention to the work, you miss these things. Levine hypnotizes with his ideas and phrasing and clear, sharp images.

Here are the voices of the lost; here are the voices of the downtrodden. Levine has stepped away from academic games and has become a voice of the American poor in the Whitman tradition. As an epigraph in _Selected Poems_ reads, "Vivas for those who have failed."

Levine has had a great influence on me and my work. Anyone writing poetry should check out Levine's work. I'd recommend _What Work Is_ also. In my opinion, it's his best book.

Philip Levine¹s Collected Works is an amazing biography of a life. Spanning a so-far-incomplete life, we can follow Levine¹s progress of maturation. While the beginning poems are strong, it is the middle and end pieces that were the most startling, poems about the working class and later his son. His ability to mix narration and the more typical elements of poetry is extraordinary. Compare the first and last sentences of ³One For The Rose²: ³Three weeks ago I went back / to the same street corner where / 27 years before I took a bus for Akron, / Ohio, but now there was only a blank space / with a few concrete building blocks / scattered among the beer cans², ³Instead I was born / in the wrong year and in the wrong place, / and I made my way so slowly and badly / that I remember every single turn, / and each one smells like an overblown rose, / yellow, American, beautiful, and true.² Levine writes American poetry in the American diction better than anyone since Whitman or Sandburg. His language is conservative and seems simple at first, but when the poem blossoms we are all the more surprised and excited because of it. This book is a gem to read and contains a story, making it as hard to put down as your favorite novel.

This is Phil Smiths son. And i know when theres good literature. And this one is one of the best. When he was younger, he loved poetry, and he still does to this day. This is a great book!

Yes this is the greatest bokk ever!...I loved the book!

Everyone who has read this book has said it was the best book on Shakespeare they have ever read. So why is it still out of print? This book needs to be republished with a new cover (possibly with the goddess instead of the boar?), and it needs an index, perhaps instead of the outline form table of contents. It is a classic!

What makes a genius tick? What made Shakespeare tick? If Shakespeare's vision seems inexhaustible, all-encompassing, transcendental - one might say 'mythic' - then how did he manage it? Where did that vision come from? And where, while we're at it, did the *poetry* come from?

Many of the world's finest literary minds over the last 400 years have been drawn to such questions, and more than a few have made valuable strides towards the answers. But even so, you would search long and hard for a book to equal Ted Hughes' "Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being" - if it's those big questions that you're interested in.

Whilst no brief summary can really do this book justice, here's a rough attempt anyway...

1. For the last fifteen plays of his career (i.e. throughout his artistic maturity), Shakespeare consistently employed the same basic prototype plot structure - what Hughes calls his "Tragic Equation". That plot structure was derived from the inspired fusion of the plots of Shakespeare's two long narrative poems, "Venus and Adonis" and "The Rape of Lucrece". Hughes demonstrates (with staggering thoroughness) that behind every major male protagonist (Troilus, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear etc.) is the god Adonis, and behind every female figure (Cressida, Gertrude/Ophelia, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Cordelia etc.) is the goddess Venus - or, more accurately, the Goddess of Complete Being.

This alone would make the book an astounding achievement of literary detective work. But there is much more to it than that...

2. By combining the two myths in this way, Shakespeare hit upon an unfailing source of dramatic (and poetic) power. Indeed, what he tapped into was virtually the power source of all human feeling itself. To understand this, think about myth and religion and what they seem to be, VIZ, the expression of our profoundest primal instincts, of our deepest psycho-biological mysteries. They are, if you like, the DNA code of our very souls. (Or to put it less ridiculously, they are the living artistic expression of everything we think and feel at our core.) Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Isis, Osiris, Horus, Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Mary, Krishna, Shiva - and countless others from around the planet - these gods (and their experiences and sufferings) embody our brightest truths and our darkest mysteries. Their stories are the stories of our collective consciousness.

3. This explains why Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear somehow feel like gods to us too: Shakespeare was quite deliberately forcing them to live out the mythic destiny of Adonis himself. Adonis is one of the oldest prototypes of the worldwide phenomenon of the sacrificed god; as such, he is a near relative of Osiris, Dionysus, Christ, and countless others - just as Venus/Lucrece is a first cousin of Isis, Demeter, the Virgin Mary, etc.

4. Moreover, Shakespeare's *mythic intuition* was somehow greater than other writers before or since. In other words, he discovered all the mythic possibilities of these two key stories - what exactly they were expressing. (Without going into *what* they do express, which is a key theme of Hughes' book, all I shall say here is that they are born of very deeply rooted impulses in all of us, that their key cultural manifestations are what Hughes terms "the Great Goddess and the Sacrificed God", and that they express, if you like, humanity's *tragic dilemma*.)

5. Once he discovered this mythic key to his imagination (i.e. the two poems explosively combined), Shakespeare could then dedicate his entire mature career to exploring the corridors it unlocked. He harnessed all the various potentialities of those deeply rooted ancient stories for his own Elizabethan dramas. To use a rather violent analogy, his 'Tragic Equation' was a kind of dramatist's atomic bomb: once he had discovered the essential nuclear reaction, he could go on finding new ways of inducing it, ways of making the explosion bigger or smaller, and even finally - in "The Tempest" - how to prevent the explosion from occurring at all. He spent twelve years pursuing this obsession, and the results speak for themselves.

6. Indeed, Hughes goes on to show that it's always at the same particular moment in each play (i.e. when "Venus and Adonis" metamorphoses into "The Rape of Lucrece" (and in the late plays, back again)) that Shakespeare's poetry takes off to ever-greater heights. In other words, Hughes argues that by touching the primal mythic sources of the human imagination (where the two myths collide), Shakespeare gains direct access to his Muse. He touches the vision itself, and records its feel in his poetry.

"Shakespeare and The Goddess of Complete Being" is a work that forces itself upon your imagination and stays there. It is not, however, for the skim reader. It requires dedicated concentration and some considerable patience for complex, detailed argument. It also needs a fairly healthy knowledge of up to a dozen or so of the mature plays - you might need to get out your edition of the Complete Works and start revising.

Yet for all that, this book is a real joy to read. Its luminous prose could only come from a poet of Hughes' own calibre; its massive scope (compassing everything from the shamanic initiation dream of a Siberian Goldi leader to Occult Neoplatonism in Renaissance Europe) is endlessly exciting and surprising; and its ear for Shakespeare's poetry and eye for his mythological allusion is virtually unparalleled.

But it's really for the insights into the nature of genius that this book is truly unforgettable. By the time you've reached "Our revels now are ended..." (at the end of the long dramatic sequence), Hughes has shown you exactly *how* Shakespeare keeps managing to follow his Muse up to ever more dizzying heights - almost as if you're a passenger on the journey with him. And *that*, for a 'mere' work of literary criticism, is surely astonishing.

I came to Ted Hughes through the work of Sylvia Plath. I cannot profess to be huge fan of his poetry, although it clearly has a thread of brilliance through it. His essays, however are truly illuminating. I'm not sure if there is another English language critic today who can bore so deeply into the essence of his subject, look at it from so many angles and levels, and, place it in so many contexts. His interests are universal but his gaze is most acute when looking into the psycho drama of literary creation. This book, covering a selection of every period of his career provides the reader with new insights into reading he might have already covered as well as a wealth of new material. Some selections rank with T S Eliot's 'Sacred Wood' as some of the century's most profound literary criticism.

It is difficult to call to my mind a book that could more thoroughly engage a serious reader, in a reading life that spans three or four decades, than Winter Pollen.

Hughes has a way of putting things into a context that the western mind can participate in. He is a wholly erudite man in a time when the world is as "thoroughly departmental" as an ant colony. It is with awe and a total liberation from the constraints of work, family, provincialism, capitalism and religionism that one plunges into this hypnotic work that moves from Shakespeare to Sufism like a streetcar moving along an established route.

Hughes' consciousness and curiosity is like a web he has spun around the world and into the universe, and we, his readers, are taken into his micro and macrocosms like children on a field trip, wondering why, after we have finished an essay or section of Winter Pollen, we do not think about these things more often. It is with a keen sense of what inspires wonder that he awakens wonder in a reader. He walks with an acrobat's balance across a tight rope spanning a gorge with carnivorous pedants on one side and stoned surrealists on the other, both camps trying to distract him and cause a fall, realizing his full commitment to either would precipitate a disaster for the other.

It is truly a wonder that he is not more celebrated and more known. Magazine publications with alleged literary repute have trumpeted writers with less than a tenth of his skill and imagination for three decades. But this is all OK. Perhaps a world sensible enough to embrace this literary lion would be too dull.

This book is the most complete collection of Sylvia Plath's poetry assembled in one volume. It is for this reason that it belongs almost as required reading, not just in American english programs, but in secondary schools everywhere. It's value lies in it's progression of a female poet and her journey towards finding her true voice. We see the early poems, methodically and skillfully written, shedding style after style of obvious influences through excercises of observation and perserverance. Through these verses, she explores and develops an intricate mythology; by the end, however, she has not lost us in her private world of symbolism and imagery, but enthralls us, heartbreakingly, through the mastery of her words. These last poems, that made up her final manuscript, are undisputedly some of the most moving and beautifully executed compositions of this past century. It is a wonderful book, one that forever changes the way the reader interprets art and the world around him that inspires it.

Gosh, I love Sylvia Plath's prose and poetry. I could read and reread some of her poems again and again. This is a great collection of her poems. I keep this book loose on my bookshelf when I feel like getting shivers up my spine before I go to sleep. There are some poems that I can just read and reread over and over again that make me feel... oh, mysterious, anxious, happy, perplexed... and Sylvia Plath is one of the poets who has written multiple poems that give me those feelings. Most people who like poetry are familiar with Mirror or Daddy, but there are other poems that people don't know about. I loved the sonnet "To Time" and the poem "Mystic." It is interesting to read her poems knowing what she was going through... reading the poems that coincide with certain events in her life, like her marriage to Ted Hughes, and poems that she wrote about her attempted suicides. I suggest this collection to anyone who is interested in this woman... and I also recommend that you read The Bell Jar as you read her poems, or maybe a few of her journal entries. Sylvia Plath is one of those poets that writes about herself, and knowing background on her life is crucial in understanding these poems. Well, you can decide for yourself.

I love poetry, and this every poetry lover's fantasy. Having a volume of one of the best poet's ever almost complete collection. This is a book that I treasure, all the poems are masterpieces, and so beautiful. No one will ever write or think like Sylvia Plath again. This is a must-have for all of her fans. I own many poetry volumes--and this has to be my favorite. I would definitely recommend this--it was well deserving of 5 stars, and even people who aren't big fans of poetry have no choice but to love "The Collected Poems" by Sylvia Plath.

R. Kent Hughes hits the nail on the head. The world in general and the church in particular is suffering from a lack of godly leadership. When pastors and longtime church leaders are falling into sin on a daily basis, Christians need a wake-up call to spiritual living. And it's the men who must take the lead.

This book is ten years old, but it has never been more relevant. Mixing biblical exposition with practical application, Hughes gives men a prescription for righteous living.

As hard as it is to take, this veteran pastor speaks to men on their terms. Carefully organized, The Disciplines of a Godly Man, goes through each phase of a man's life. It delivers Scriptural guidelines on issues like lust, pride, responsibility, and marriage.

Keep this book on your nightstand. Its a must-have for Christian leaders, including preachers, educators, and laymen. Men, take The Disciplines of a Godly Man and lead in the way God has called you to lead.

One of the frustrations in my life is that I have been a christian for 1/2 of my 43 years and you would think that I would be farther along on my journey to become a disciple. Mr. Hughes, the author of this book, shares his thoughts on becoming a man of God, and some areas that we need to focus in on. In chapters like, "The Discipline of Marriage", he points out ways that men stumble and encourages us to avoid the pitfalls that have tripped so many up. This book takes a hard line on sin, but doesn't preach. It encourages us to be strong and courageous and gives practical steps for keeping the victory over sin. It is an excellent book to use in a men's discussion group. You can read a chapter each week, read the scriptures which are referenced and discuss the end of chapter questions. I recommend this to every man, 15 and up.

It is easy to see why Kent Hughes' book has been such a best seller. The author has compiled in these pages an invaluable collection of helpful, spiritual advice for men in the 21st century. I am not aware of a more comprehensive volume that covers so many topics within one cover.

Hughes identifies the following life areas: relationships, soul, character, ministry, and grace. He then provides specific disciplines that each cultivate a more dynamic Christian lifestyle. His advice is Biblically sound, culturally relevant, and easy to understand.

This book will be very helpful to any man who desires to grow deeper in his devotion to Jesus Christ. While it is only an introductory work, it provides a solid foundation on which to begin a more structured approach to discipleship. I recommend it highly.

The Waste Land, published in 1922 and considered one of the major works associated with modernism. This poem deals despairingly with the state of post-World War I society, which Eliot saw as sterile and decadent. Numerous references to religious imagery, mythology and literature of the past are used ironically to point out the comparative emptiness of Eliot's time.

T.S. Eliot wrote "The Waste Land" against the backdrop of a world gone mad-- searching for reason inside chaos, and striving to build an ark of words by which future generations could learn what had gone before, T.S. Eliot explores that greatest of human melancholy-- disillusionment. This is a difficult poem, but one well-worth exploring to its fullest. The inherent rhythms of Eliot's speech, the delightful, though sometimes obscure, allusions, and intricate word-craft, create an atmosphere of civilization on the edge-- in danger of forgetting its past, and therefore repeating it. In the end, only the poet is left, to admonish the world to peace, to preserve the ruins of the old life, and to ensure that future generations benefit from the disillusions of the past.

"Prufrock" is perhaps the best "mid-life crisis" poem ever written. In witty, though self-deprecating and often downright bitter, tones, Eliot goes on a madcap but infinitely somber romp through the human mind. This is a poem of contradictions, of repression, of human fear, and human self-defeat. Technically, "Prufrock" is brilliant, with a varied and intricate style suited to the themes of madness, love, and self-doubt.

Buy this. You won't regret it. If you're an Eliot fan, you probably have it anyway. If you're not, you will be when you put it down.

The Waste Land is sometimes considered to be the greatest poem of the twentieth century. This collection from Dover (at an amazing price) includes this and several other of Eliot's poems. The Waste Land, however, is considered to be his masterpiece, his 'epic,' in a sense. In fact, it is interesting to compare Eliot's bleak vision of a land of waste to other, earlier epics.

The poem is in some sense a warning, in another sense a cry of despair. The image of the wasted land, of the spiritually degenerate human race, is depressing, yet the poem ends with a glimmer (albeit faint) of hope--salvation is possible, however unlikely. I am no expert on this poem, and like most people understand only fragments of it, but what I have gained from the poem I have found to be very enlightening, and very stirring.

Eliot draws many references from the old legend of the Fisher-King, and an idea of what this legend is about (in all its many forms) is useful in interpreting the poem. This is undoubtedly one of the classics in both English literature and modernist writings, and very worthwhile for anyone who is willing to take the time to study it.

A metaphor can be a very dangerous tool to wield; quite often while you are trying to reference one particular aspect of a thing, myriad other associations and relations spring to peoples' minds and they may well be quite different from those correspondences you intended to summon. Such is definitely the case with The Iron Giant by Ted Hughes--once England's poet laureate, now best remembered, albeit unfairly, by angry feminists as the husband who drove Sylvia Plath to her grave. Hughes tells the amiable story of a huge metal robot who crashes to Earth and after putting himself back together begins to sate his enormous appetite for metal by devouring cars and tractors and the like. Infuriated local farmers trap him, despite the efforts of one friendly boy named Hogarth. But the Iron Giant turns out to be quite useful when an enormous space-bat-angel-dragon attacks Earth and demands a tribute of animate matter to consume. The Iron Giant agrees to battle the monster, vanquishes him and determines that the creature is actually peaceful but was attracted to Earth by man's violence. The space-bat-angel-dragon agrees to return to space, where his "music of the spheres" has such a calming effect that Earth becomes a peaceful place.

Now the intent of Hughes's original story, as well as that of the very good recent movie which is loosely based on it, is to show the futility of war, violence, etc. Hughes book was written at the height of the Cold War and the space-bat-angel-dragon can be understood to be the Left's idealized version of the Soviet Union--a threat only because of our own attitudes and actions. The Soviet Union having been disposed of in subsequent years, the movie makes a more generalized anti-gun, anti-military, pro-nonconformity statement. But the truly delicious irony in both cases is that the most obvious subtext of the story is at war with the intended central message. Because, at the end of the day, the Iron Giant is nothing less than Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative come to life and saving the world. The author's pacifist message and the filmmaker's antiestablishment message are overwhelmed by the powerful metaphorical symbol of a gigantic defensive weapon being the only thing standing between mankind and certain destruction. How delightful the irony that book and movie basically end up being pleas for the biggest boondoggle in the history of the military-industrial complex.

I liked both book and movie very much. The film in particular may be the best non-Disney animated feature film ever made. Obviously the symbolism of the Iron Giant has escaped the control of the storytellers; but the metaphorical ironies merely add an additional layer of enjoyment.

GRADE:

Book: B+

Film: A-

This is such a delightful book filled with imagination and peaceful resolution to differences. Children are captured by the amazing character "Iron Giant" and us adults enjoy the simple way that life winds around in this story of two very alien creatures.

Neither children nor adults need know the intricacies of Ted Hughes' life to appreciate this book. In fact, they might be better off not knowing. England's poet laureate drove two wives to suicide--Sylvia Plath and, six years later, Assia Welville, who also murdered her child.

Readers need know nothing about the Cold War, either, though Hughes clearly created this story as an allegory about the evil of war. He gave the characters very little development. Hogarth, the boy who centers the movie based very loosely on this book, functions as a sort of trigger. But there's not much explanation about why he acts, or why anyone acts, for that matter.

Nevertheless, the plot will draw even the most tortured second-grade reader into its tangle of fantasy, words and poetry. And once there, he will find it impossible to escape until the book is done. (My favorite part is the music of the spheres--the music that space made, a strange soft music, deep and weird, like millions of voices singing together.)

The Iron Giant came to the top of a cliff one night, no one knows how or from where he had come. The wind sang through his iron fingers, and his great iron head, shaped like a dustbin but big as a bedroom, slowly turned right, then slowly turned left. Down the cliff he fell, his iron legs, arms and ears breaking loose and falling off as he went. The pieces scattered, crashed, bumped, clanged down onto the rocky beach far below, where the sound of the sea chewed away at it, and the pieces of the Iron Giant lay scattered far and wide, silent and unmoving.

See what I mean? When the Giant was discovered after biting a tractor in two, the farmers whose equipment he had ruined dug a deep enormous hole, a stupendous hole on the side of which they put a rusty old truck to attract him. Hogarth lured the Giant there, and when he finally came to the trap, the farmers filled it in on top of him and let out a great cheer. Of course, the Giant escaped, and Hogarth (who felt guilty) found a home for him in the local scrap yard, where he could eat tractors to his heart's content.

Then arrived from Space a terribly black, terribly scaly, terribly knobbly, terribly horned, terribly hairy, terribly clawed, terribly fanged creature with vast indescribably terrible eyes, each one as big as Switzerland. It landed in Australia, where it covered the whole continent, and all the armies of the world decided to fight this space-bat-angle-dragon, who demanded live creatures as food. They declared war and lost. It was Hogarth's idea to call upon the Iron Giant for help.

I won't tell you how the story ended. But the important point, for grown-ups at least, is that in creating his 1968 Cold War space-bat-angle-dragon, the erstwhile pacifist poet Hughes also created a vision of evil incarnate--the kind of evil that wishes to engulf the entire world, that cannot be reasoned with, cannot be pacified and must be fought. Ironic, isn't it? Alyssa A. Lappen