CC> Eliot was extraordinarily uneven

Well his poetry was anyway. Even he thought so. He remarked somewhere that it came like toothpaste out of a tube. No doubt he reached the pinnacle he did by throwing so much of it out.

P. M.

Carrol Cox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>. . .I think what is fascinating is how quickly he
>> developed. This is from 1905. By the time he is at Harvard, he's writing
>"The
>> Death of Saint Narcissus."
>
>He remained capable of producing  some pretty awful verse. See the couplets
>cut by Pound from TWL. Pound's comment was that Eliot couldn't write
>couplets better than Pope's. But that is too high praise; he couldn't write
>couplets that weren't almost embarrassing. The passage is utterly flat. And
>this after Prufrock & Preludes, & when he was capable of writing Gerontion!!
>Eliot was extraordinarily uneven.
>
>Carrol
>
>