Surely the first thing that strikes anyone on looking at the selection from Poems, 1920 is that they are extraordinarily difficult. In 'Gerontion' and the quatrain poems, Eliot uses dislocation: we seem to slide suddenly from one scene, or voice, or topic, or image to another, and the link is not at all clear. Then there is the obstacle course of quotations and allusions - in 'Burbank' a whole heap of them - which defy us to recognise and make sense of them. On top of this are difficulties in language, such as the tortuous syntax of 'Gerontion', and the abstruse vocabulary ('Polypohiloprogenitive' etc.). As if that were not enough, we have strange names to makes sense of (Princess Volupine, the 'characters' in 'Gerontion'), references to classical myth ('Sweeney among the Nightingales') and obscure theology ('Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'), and a lack of clear subject matter. And the voice with which the poems are delivered seems frequently to change in tone - from ironic and sardonic to philosophical to, occasionally, lyrical (the description of the painting in 'Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'). It is comforting to discover that the best-read critics and scholars have found these poems extremely hard - even impossible - to fathom. Some have seen them as a bit of a dead end in Eliot's work (he never returned to this tight quatrain form for more than a few lines), an experimental phase between Prufrock and 'The Waste Land'.
Difficulty is itself an important aspect of Eliot's work, so we should pause and consider it. He himself took the view that modern poetry had to be complex if it was to present a truthful representation of modern experience. Here he is, in a lecture published in 1921:
It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. ('The Metaphysical Poets')
Why, we might ask following Eliot, should poetry be easy? Scientists don't expect the material world to deliver its secrets up easily; and if art is a comparable investigation into the human world of culture and civilization, then that, too is likely to be as dense and exacting as scientific research (Eliot compares the creative act to a scientific experiment in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'). This is especially the case when that culture lies shattered into fragments after the cataclysm of World War One.
Here are some links to commentaries on the 1920 poems as a whole, and some of the individual poems.
Poems, 1920
Nigel Alderman, 'Where are the eagles and the trumpets?': the strange case of Eliot's missing quatrains - on the quatrain poems as a group. Accessible from JSTOR here.
Heather Bryant Jordan, Ara vos Prec: A Rescued Volume
Individual Poems
Critical interpretations of Gerontion
Thomas Day, analysis of 'Gerontion' in agenda poetry
Skylar Hamel, essay on The Hippopotamus
Cummings Guide, Sweeney Among the Nightingales
Gabriel Ellsworth, Analysis of 'Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'
Keith Sagar, link on this page to Sagar's paper on 'Prufrock Supine and Sweeney Erect'
