Ken Anderson

An interesting take on Eliot--and by extension, 20th Century Modernism--largely rooted in Marxist theory.

A portrait of Tolstoy as seeker--seeker of the perfect in art, seeker of higher consciousness, and seeker of religious truth. A psychological biography of the Russian author even before such biographies were formally undertaken, the book delivers a lasting impression of Tolstoy as an intellectually vibrant, powerfully driven, and deeply aware writer at odds with a changing world drifting nearer and nearer the brink. A prescient and well-written depiction of a man whose quest for answers resulted in some of the finest writing in Russian literature.

Perhaps the most spiritually complex poem, with its attempt to expand the religious context of the poem to include ancient traditional religions (like Hinduism) as opposed to newer founded religions (like Christianity), this quartet relaxes its focus to mixed results, but braces the reader for the refocus found in the last poem, Little Gidding (London, 1942).

In spite of being second in the sequence, this poem is actually the first conceived as part of a suite of four long poems. Burnt Norton had been published some years earlier as a kind of capstone poem to Eliot's Collected Poems, 1909-1935 (London, 1936.) East Coker opened the door to more installments and the development of Eliot's interdependent themes.

A famously troubling couple of last lines. And, considering Eliot first published the poem at the close of his Collected Poems, 1909-1935 (London, 1936), it raised the alarm among readers and scholars that Eliot had given up poetry.

A classic in the Western Canon. Simple as that.