Ol' T.S. was a piece of work. He was your classic Modernist overachiever—doing multi-duty as a poet, essayist, playwright, and critic. He was indisputably a genius. He was also a jerk.

No, we're not just talking about his iffy relationship with his ailing wife. We're talking about his sadistic relationship to his readers. "Hey, poetry-lovers," Eliot seems to say. "You think you can hack poetry? How about poetry in six different languages? Huh? Yeah, you like that? How about references to thirty five different obscure authors? Huh? You like that? Yeah, didn't think so. Wuss."

T.S. Eliot sets up hoops and asks you, the ever-patient reader, to jump through them. Some people are reduced to tears by this game of "spot all the allusions." Some people love it. But there's one thing that all readers of Eliot agree on: this dude was ridiculously smart and talented.

"Hollow Men"

You may have heard the lines "This is the way the world will end/Not with a bang, but a whimper." Awesome, right? Well, they come from this poem.

"Hollow Men" is Eliot's way of describing the lost souls of his generation, traumatized by their experience in WWI.

"The Waste Land"

This poem is super-duper important. In this work, Eliot sounds like a Victorian, all mopey and depressed over how far civilization has fallen. But his method is definitely Modernist.

Like Pound, Eliot gives poetic conventions a good shake, throwing all sorts of references into a blender and producing works of great complexity composed of allusions to and fragments from other texts.

That makes it hard for the reader, but this is intentional (and, yes, kind of sadistic). Eliot believed that writers and readers alike have to work to construct some sort of new form and meaning: he was clearly a follower of the 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration school of reading. "The Waste Land" forces readers to go on a treasure hunt, playing a game of "collect 'em all" when it comes to allusions to classical texts.

"The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"

This is also one of the big daddies of Modernist poetry. It's about a sadsack named Prufrock walking around, wondering why the ladeez don't love him in the way he feels he deserves to be loved. Womp, womp. It's also about the passage of time, and how cruel and unrelenting it is.

Chew on this:

Eliot evokes the epic tradition of poetry by choosing an epigraph from Dante's Inferno for "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock." But it is clear from the poem's content that Eliot doesn't think the modern age can really produce an actually epic.

Why does Eliot make the poem look like an epic and sound like an epic in places only to disappoint us with something that is clearly so mundane (a dude moaning about his girl troubles)?