Thomas Stearns Eliot

Its a small world. When I worked as a writer at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica In '39, I spoke to the printer who did good job printing our stuff. His name was Paul Williams and he boasted that he was the brother of William Carlos Williams, the American poet, of whom I had never heard. I liked the rhyming poetry of Poe, Frost and Nash and thus I learned about the not-rhyming Americans, such as Williams, Eliot and Pound. I discovered that the rhyming of the end words of poem lines were nowhere as near the essence of good poetry as were the thoughts that were conveyed. A series of such introductions, as follows, have occurred: My son-in-law explained that his mother was a cousin of Thomas Stearns Eliot, who wrote '...this is the way the world ends'....I was given a book entitled 'The American Inquisition' that explained how Ezra Pound escaped the penalty for Treason by being diagnosed as insane, learning that Ezra was instrumental in helping T S Eliot and William Carlos get their poems published, and that, when Google was asked to search for William Carlos Williams' brother Paul, Google delivered me to the Gutenberg Press where a poem sits titled 'William Carlos Williams' brother Paul'.
While I toured Ireland, at a graveyard behind the church at Sligo, I found the headstone of William Butler Yeats' grave on which was chiseled '...cast a cold eye', a phrase that I once chose as my email name because Yeats was one of those 'not-rhyming' thoughtful poets.

All the poems of T S Eliot should be published here with permission.

TS Eliot (who had become a British citizen in 1927) was long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber - eventually he became director of the firm, and in such position published many younger poets.

The Waste Land was written by T.S. Eliot in 1922
Here is the 1st of its 5 parts:

The Waste Land

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering 5
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, 10
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie, 15
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, 20
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock, 25
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock) ,
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust. 30
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; 35
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, 40
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, 45
With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations. 50
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. 55
I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.
Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,
Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:
One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City, 60
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. 65
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying “Stetson!
You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! 70
That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! 75
You! hypocrite lecteur! —mon semblable, —mon frère! ”

PLEASE tell me why I cannot add any of Eliot's poetry to my list of favorite poems!

A wonderful poet who's poetry has changed my life

The Waste Land is the most important piece of American literature ever published. It is Eliot's tour-de-force, a stunningly realistic portrayal of the downfall of western civilization. It was the first poem to require pages and pages of footnotes! I think it contained 50 or more references to classic literature and music...

I got his book Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats for my b-day a couple years ago. All the poems in that book are so cute! My favorite one is 'Cat Morgan Introduces Himself.' I liked how Eliot changed the spelling of some of the words to show Morgan's accent.

I got his book Old Possum's Book Of Practical Cats for my b-day a couple years ago. All the poems in that book are so cute! My favorite one is 'Cat Morgan Introduces Himself.' I liked how Eliot changed the spelling of some of the words to show Morgan's accent.