Guardian Witness, A Book That Changed Me: T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems

In praise of T.S. Eliot's Selected Poems
On Guardian Witness

Every dreary day that I walk over London Bridge with hoardes of city workers streaming towards me in their grey suits, against a grey sky, I think of T.S. Eliot’s crowd who ‘flowed over London Bridge, so many,/ I had not thought death had undone so many’.

In this he encapsulates a sense of banal futility that still pervades our world now, and yet when I think of his Selected Poems I do not think of them negatively. To me they are full of necessary realism, of perfectly articulated truth and, ultimately, of hope.

I once read 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' aloud to myself, sitting at my kitchen table at the age of 21, panicking about what to do with my life. It made me feel so calm, so accepting of the fact that we cannot squeeze the universe into a ball and know what to do with it, that my panic receded into unexpected contentment. The commonplace elegance of his words, the utter joy in linguistic play and the profound, enduring resonance of his words turns even the most depressing of thoughts into beauty. It makes the things that sadden me in this world seem but fragments within a more positive whole.

To read on Guardian Witness, see here.
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