Did you know that T. S. Eliot wrote a poem entitled "The Triumph of Bullshit"? Neither did I until I started reading The Poems of T. S. Eliot, volume one (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), the massive tome edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue in an heroic act of scholarly dedication. Of its 1311 pages, approximately nine hundred and sixty are devoted to commentary, and I cannot imagine a more meticulously annotated book of TSE's greatest hits. I meant to review it nearer its pub date last December, but to do it justice would require forty seminar hours. The commentary and notes are immensely valuable. Eliot is no doubt the profoundest modern poet, and the one with the greatest lasting influence. And it is good to remind us, as the volume does, that in his younger days, Eliot had an irrepressible sense of humor that was gloriously incorrect. For example, consider "The Triumph of Bullshit," one of tse-tse's "scabrous exuberances," in Ricks's phrase. Stanza one follows:
Ladies, on whom my attentions have waited
If you consider my merits are small
Etiolated, alembicated,
Orotund, tasteless, fantastical,
Monotonous, crotchety, constipated,
Impotent galamatias
Affected, possibly imitated,
For Christ's sake stick it up your ass.
You can read the rest of this curiously erudite poem here. -- DL
