“Mr Eliot is always quite consciously ‘trying for’ something, and something which has grown out of and developed beyond all the poems of all the dead poets. Poetry to him seems to be not so much an art as a science.”
+ − Ath p491 Je 20 ’19 600w Booklist 16:305 Je ’20
“The ‘Poems’—ironically so-called—of T. S. Eliot, if not heavy and pedantic parodies of the ‘new poetry,’ are documents that would find sympathetic readers in the waiting-room of a private sanatorium. As a parodist, Mr Eliot is lacking in good taste, invention, and wit.” R. M. Weaver
− Bookm 52:57 S ’20 1400w
“Reading these poems (?) is like being in a closed room full of foul air; not a room in an empty house that is sanctified with mould and dust, but a room in which the stale perfume of exotics is poisoned with the memory of lusts.” W. S. B.
− Boston Transcript p6 Ap 14 ’20 500w
Reviewed by E. E. Cummings
+ Dial 68:781 Je ’20 1400w
“At least two-thirds of Eliot’s sixty-three pages attain no higher eminence than extraordinarily clever—and eminently uncomfortable—verse. The exaltation which is the very breath of poetry—that combination of tenderness and toughness—is scarcely ever present in Eliot’s lines. Scarcely ever, I reiterate, for a certain perverse exultation takes its place; an unearthly light without warmth which has the sparkle if not the strength of fire. It flickers mockingly through certain of the unrhymed pictures and shines with a bright pallor out of the two major poems.” L: Untermeyer
+ − Freeman 1:381 Je 30 ’20 2000w