I have read two of the four poems and am enjoying them. This obituary in the New York Times provides an excellent biography and insight into his personality.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/2...liot-obit.html
Quote:
He had a strong dislike for most teaching of poetry, and he once recalled that he had been turned against Shakespeare in his youth by didactical instructors.
"I took a dislike to 'Julius Caesar' which lasted, I am sorry to say, until I saw the film of Marlon Brando and John Gielgud, and a dislike to 'The Merchant of Venice' which persists to this day.
"It may be that a few plays and poems must be sacrificed [in school] in order that we learn that English literature exists and that an ordinary acquaintance with it is desirable."
Eliot believed, moreover, that "unless a teacher is a person who reads poetry for enjoyment he or she cannot stimulate pupils to enjoy it."
Pursuing this theme, he once described how teachers of literature should go about it:
"My Ideal Teacher will teach the prescribed classics of literature as history, as part of history which every educated person should know something about, whether he likes it or not; and then should lead some of the pupils to enjoyment, and the rest at least to the point of recognizing that there are other persons who do enjoy it. And he will introduce the pupils to contemporary poetry by exciting enjoyment; enjoyment first and understanding second."
Eliot, however, was not one to minimize the difficulties of understanding poetic complexities or achieving empathy with its mood and feeling. "The reader of a poem," he admonished, "should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading a decision on a complicated case."
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