I opted to pick up a copy of T.S. Eliot’s late poetry cycle, Four Quartets the other day. A line from the first poem in the cycle, Burnt Norton, provided the title to one of my favorite British television mysteries, Wire in the Blood (I love the first three seasons – but stopped watching after Hermione Norris left the show). The book was just sitting there, waiting for me, at Capitol Hill Books. How could I not pick it up?

Now, I feel deeply torn. Should I admit? Should I say it? I read these poems years ago, and while I knew then that they were not as good as, say Prufrock or the Wasteland, that was like criticizing a novel for not being as good as Ulysses. It’s too high of a bar to fairly set.

But now, when I read the Quartets, it is like reading some young kid’s effort to write like Eliot. It’s a parody of the high modernist style of his earlier works – that youthful student, in the full flush of first encountering writers like Eliot, Sartre, and Marx and then proceeds to tell his elders all about them (I admit – I was that student in my youth). I try to hammer through it, but I cannot shake the nagging sensation that this is bad writing.

But it’s by Eliot? How can that be?

Maybe I need to set aside a little longer and come back to it in ten or twenty years and see if more experience will not favorably color my views.