Eliot Complete

THE COMPLETE POEMS AND PLAYS (392 pp.)--T. S. Eliot--Harcourt, Brace ($6).

At a literary cocktail party in Claridge's Hotel, in London, the daughter of a U.S. publisher whispered: "Daddy, is it all right for me to leave now? I've already shaken hands with Mr. Eliot." She was not being snippy. She was simply recognizing the importance of Thomas Stearns Eliot.

That importance is by now indisputable, but there were many disputes along the way. And it is the quality, not the quantity, of his poems that has won T. S. Eliot his reputation: at 64, his published poems number hardly threescore. These riches-in-little-room contain the comment of one highly civilized brain and a poetic talent as deep, constricted and penetrating as an oil well, on the human condition in today's world. These 61 poems and three verse plays are now for the first time published in one volume in The Complete Poems and Plays.

Every poet runs the risk of being misunderstood; and there are many readers who do not care to make the effort to understand Eliot. But he is never willfully obscure, though his poems are compact of literary allusions, many of which will escape the thinly read. But no reasonably well-educated and sensitive reader can escape the poems' impact and meaning. In The Complete Poems the course he has run becomes clear. It began with satire that expressed something close to contempt for his fellow men. But Eliot survived and surpassed satire. His maturer poems are religious, culminating in the magnificent Four Quartets, the only major poem the 20th century has produced.

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