His language is so simple and yet I can't piece it together

>>8930487
Start with the Greeks

>>8930499
Shut the fuck up peasant

Be more specific.

>>8930487
Never trust a poet who looks like a banker unless he actually is a banker.

>>8930528
Where does his style come from?

What ideas and what poets was he influenced by?

>>8930499
Literally one of the only contexts where it's actually necessary to start with the Greeks.

Eliot was very well read and references ancient myth, history, literature from all European time periods. Most of his poems incorporate multiple languages including dead languages.

The epigraph to The Waste Land for instance is an approximation of a conversation between and ancient Greek mythological figure known for her immortality and her Roman captors.

It goes roughly like this:
"Sybil, what do you want? (in Latin)"
"To Die (in ancient Greek)"

So if you wanted to get that without looking it up, you would need to know Latin and ancient Greek fluently, as well as the myth of Sybil and that she's known for immortality.

>>8930584
It's not in Latin, it's in Greek too. The narrative description is in Latin, yhe dialogues are in Greek.

>>8930605
I didn't go look it up to make sure everything was 100% correct but the point still stands.

>>8930623
I didn't say you were wrong, just wanted to clarify it.

I would also add that an understanding of Eastern philosophy is kinda important to understand Eliot. He read the Gita in Sanskrit, and was influenced by the Buddha's teachings (you can see that very clearly in The Waste Land).

You may also want an annotated edition. For Waste Land, there's the Norton Critical Edition. You can find a PDF in Libgen.

Prufrock is not that difficult. It's actually quite straight-forward. If you really can't into it, read some essays and interpretations on it. Even freaking SparkNotes works.

>>8930487
An image of something
With surprising detail
Juxtaposed against a backdrop of rather large and universal imponderables
Reflects a failure of Modernism to properly achieve what it set out to do...

Because there's no middle. You can't capture reality in words, but only hint and scratch at the cobwebs of thought that whisper back and forth through the electric static.

When you see a pattern in all of human history that you can barely piece together, and you see how impossibly unimportant you are, yet you look around you and can plainly reckon how you, too, are a node in the infinite complexity of all the absurd and vast cosmos, you tend to hum a little softer when you walk through lonely streets.

And you know there can't be a god in the sense that you'd want to shake his hand.

And you know that those savages they write about have just as much history as you do, and you could join their tribe and still never have been born there.

And why were you born where you were?

And why were they born they are?

And is there even really a difference between a Yawp from a rooftop and an Ubangi glottal-stop?

This is Eliot, never quite expressing directly what he means, because not only would it sound quite pedantic were it put straightforward, but because it's not really even English that you can express it in.

He lives in another language, something like Heptapod B, I'd like to think, or cave-paintings of emojis found tomorrow from the ancient caves.

But do keep reading him, OP... you may yet hear the mermaids sing to you.

>>8930507
Pleb comment.

1. Read Tradition and the Individual Talent.
2. Either start with the Greeks, or find someone who did it for you (in some cases like The Waste Land, Eliot does the work for you in his footnotes, but some people believe these are ironic or purposefully incorrect, and of course you are missing tons of allusion even with them.)
3. Read slowly and read aloud. If you refuse to understand the allusions then you should at least enjoy the beauty of their sound (which should motivate you to understand the allusions).

Eliot would spend years writing and revising single poems. The least you can do is put a couple hours of work into them.

>>8930507
Nah he's right. Eliot is famous (and often maligned by the poets that came after him) for weaving intertextuality throughout his poetry, to the point where about every second line is an oblique reference to Dante or Shakespeare or Ovid or Herodotus or something. Sometimes it's ok to not know the origin of the reference as he just steals it for the poetics, but often it is necessary to know what he is alluding to in order to understand the general idea that Eliot is grasping toward.

If there was anyone for whom it is necessary to start with the Greeks, it's Eliot

>>8930605
>>8930623
>>8930660

It's in Latin and Greek, you're both right, fags:

“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi
in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:Σιβυλλα
τι θελεις; respondebat illa:αποθανειν θελω.”