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T. S. Eliot

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Theatre; Writers and
critics

             T. S. Eliot
   T.S. Eliot (by E.O. Hoppe, 1919)
   Born September 26, 1888
        St. Louis, Missouri, USA
   Died January 4, 1965
        London, England

   Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM ( September 26, 1888– January 4, 1965) was a
   poet, dramatist and literary critic, whose works, such as The Love Song
   of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, " The Hollow Men", and Four
   Quartets, are considered defining achievements of twentieth century
   Modernist poetry. The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948,
   he is considered one of the most influential poets of the 20th century.
   Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom in
   1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at
   age 39.

Life

Early life and education

   Eliot was born into a prominent family from St. Louis, Missouri. Later,
   he said that "having passed one's childhood beside the big river" (the
   Mississippi) influenced his poetry. His father, Henry Ware Eliot
   (1843–1919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of
   the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis; his mother, born
   Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843–1929), taught school before her marriage
   and wrote poems. He was their last child of a family of seven; his
   parents were 44 years old when he was born. His four surviving sisters
   were between 11 and 19 years older than he, and his brother eight years
   older.

   William Greenleaf Eliot, Eliot's grandfather, was a Unitarian minister,
   who moved to St. Louis when it was still on the frontier. He was
   instrumental in founding many of the city's institutions, including
   Washington University in St. Louis. One distant cousin was Charles
   William Eliot, president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, and a
   fifth cousin, another Thomas Eliot, was chancellor of Washington
   University. Eliot's works often allude to his youth in St. Louis (there
   was a Prufrock furniture store in town) and to New England. His family
   had Massachusetts ties and summered at a large cottage they had built
   in Gloucester, MA. The cottage, near the shore at Eastern Point, had a
   view of the sea and the young Eliot would often go sailing.

   From 1898 to 1905, Eliot was a day student at St Louis' Smith Academy,
   a preparatory school for Washington University. At the academy, Eliot
   studied Latin, Greek, French and German. Although, upon graduation, he
   could have gone to Harvard University, his parents sent him, for a
   preparatory year, to Milton Academy, in Milton, Massachusetts, near
   Boston. There, he met Scofield Thayer, who would later publish The
   Waste Land. He studied at Harvard from 1906 to 1909, where he was
   awarded a B.A.. The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems and he
   became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken. The next year, he earned a
   master's degree at Harvard. In the 1910–11 school year, Eliot lived in
   Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and touring the continent.

   Returning to Harvard in 1911 as a doctoral student in philosophy, Eliot
   studied the writings of F.H. Bradley, Buddhism and Indic philology,
   (learning Sanskrit and Pāli to read some of the religious texts.) He
   was awarded a scholarship to attend Merton College, Oxford in 1914, and
   before settling there, he visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to
   take a summer programme in philosophy. When the First World War broke
   out, however, he went to London and then to Oxford. Eliot was not happy
   at Merton and declined a second year there. Instead, in the summer of
   1915, he married, and, after a short visit to the US to see his family
   (not taking his wife), he took a few teaching jobs. He continued to
   work on his dissertation and, in the spring of 1916, sent it to
   Harvard, which accepted it. Because he did not appear in person to
   defend his thesis, however, he was not awarded his PhD. (In 1964, the
   dissertation was published as Knowledge and Experience in the
   Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.) During Eliot's university career, he
   studied with George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, Henri Bergson, C. R.
   Lanman, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell and Harold Joachim.

Later life in England

   In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, complained
   that he was still a virgin, adding: "I am very dependent upon women. I
   mean female society." Less than four months later, he was introduced by
   a fellow American at Oxford, Scofield Thayer, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood
   (May 28, 1888 – January 22, 1947). Vivien (the spelling she preferred)
   was a Cambridge governess. On 26 June 1915, Eliot and she, respectively
   aged 26 and 27 years old, were married in a register office.

   Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds were
   staying with Russell in his flat. Some critics have suggested that
   Vivien and Russell had an affair (see Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted
   Shadow), but these allegations have never been confirmed. In the 1960s,
   Eliot would write: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with
   [Vivienne] simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself
   to staying in England and dying. And she persuaded herself (also under
   the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in
   England. To her the marriage brought no happiness. To me it brought the
   state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."
   A plaque at SOAS's Faber Building, 24 Russell Square commemorating T S
   Eliot's years at Faber and Faber.
   Enlarge
   A plaque at SOAS's Faber Building, 24 Russell Square commemorating T S
   Eliot's years at Faber and Faber.

   After leaving Merton, Eliot worked as a school teacher, most notably at
   Highgate School, where he taught the young poet Sir John Betjeman and
   at The Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, where he taught in room 26,
   and, to earn extra money, wrote book reviews and lectured at evening
   extension courses. In 1917, he took a position at Lloyds Bank in
   London, where he worked on foreign accounts. In 1925, he left Lloyds to
   become a director of the publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer (later
   Faber and Faber), where he remained for the rest of his career.

   In 1927, Eliot took two important steps in his self-definition. On June
   29 he converted to Anglicanism and in November he dropped his American
   citizenship and became a British subject. In 1928, Eliot summarised his
   beliefs well when he wrote in the preface to his book For Lancelot
   Andrewes that "the general point of view [of the book's essays] may be
   described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and
   anglo-catholic in religion."

   By 1932 Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for
   some time. When Harvard University offered him the Charles Eliot Norton
   professorship for the 1932-1933 academic year he accepted; leaving
   Vivienne in England. Upon his return in 1933 Eliot officially separated
   from Vivienne. He avoided all but one meeting with his wife between his
   leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947. (Vivienne died at
   Northumberland House, a mental hospital north of London, where she was
   committed in 1938, without ever having been visited by Eliot, who was
   still her husband.)

   From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a house with his friend, the editor and
   critic John Davy Hayward, who gathered and archived Eliot's papers and
   styled himself Keeper of the Eliot Archive. He also edited a book of
   Eliot's verse called Poems Written in Early Youth. When they separated
   their household in 1957 Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's
   papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge in 1965.

   Eliot's second marriage was happy, but short. On January 10, 1957 he
   married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, to whom he was introduced by Collin
   Brooks. In sharp contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Valerie
   well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August,
   1949. As was his marriage to Vivienne, the wedding was kept a secret to
   preserve his privacy. The ceremony was held in a church at 6.15am with
   virtually no one other than his wife's parents in attendance. Valerie
   was 38 years younger than her husband. Since Eliot's death, she has
   dedicated her time to preserving his legacy; she has edited and
   annotated The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of
   The Waste Land.

   Eliot died of emphysema in London on January 4, 1965. For many years he
   had health problems owing to the combination of London air and his
   heavy smoking, often being laid low with bronchitis or tachycardia. His
   body was cremated and, according to Eliot's wishes, the ashes taken to
   St Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from which Eliot's
   ancestors emigrated to America. There, a simple plaque commemorates
   him. On the second anniversary of his death a large stone placed on the
   floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey was dedicated to
   Eliot. This commemoration contains his name, an indication that he had
   received the Order of Merit, dates, and a quotation from Little
   Gidding: "the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond /
   the language of the living."

   Later in his life, Eliot exchanged numerous letters with the comedian
   Groucho Marx. A portrait of Marx, which Eliot had requested, was
   proudly displayed in Eliot's home next to pictures of the poets Yeats
   and Valéry.

Literary career

   Eliot made his home in London. After the war, in the mid 1920s, he
   would spend time with other great artists in the Montparnasse Quarter
   in Paris, where he was photographed by Man Ray. French poetry was a
   strong influence on Eliot's work, in particular that of Charles
   Baudelaire, whose clear-cut images of Paris city life provided a model
   for Eliot's own images of London. He dabbled early in the study of
   Sanskrit and eastern religions and was a student of G. I. Gurdjieff.
   Eliot's work, following his conversion to Christianity and the Church
   of England, is often religious in nature and also tries to preserve
   historical English and broadly European values that Eliot thought
   important. This period includes such major works as Ash Wednesday, The
   Journey of the Magi, and Four Quartets.

Poetry

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

   In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended to
   Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she publish The Love Song
   of J Alfred Prufrock. Although Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot
   wrote most of the poem when he was only 22. Its now-famous opening
   lines, comparing the evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table,"
   were considered shocking and offensive, especially at a time when the
   poetry of the Georgians was hailed for its derivations of the 19th
   century Romantic Poets. The poem then follows the conscious experience
   of a man, Prufrock, (relayed in the " stream of consciousness" form
   indicative of the Modernists) lamenting his physical and intellectual
   inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual
   progress, with the recurrent theme of carnal love unattained. Critical
   opinion is divided as to whether the narrator even leaves his own
   residence during the course of the narration. The locations described
   can be interpreted either as actual physical experiences, mental
   recollections or even as symbolic images from the sub-conscious mind,
   as, for example, in the refrain "In the room the women come and go."

   Its mainstream reception can be gauged from a review in The Times
   Literary Supplement on June 21, 1917: "The fact that these things
   occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the very smallest
   importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation
   to poetry…".

   The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive
   reading of Dante Alighieri (in the Italian). References to
   Shakespeare's Hamlet and other literary works are present in the poem:
   this technique of allusion and quotation was developed in Eliot's
   subsequent poetry.

The Waste Land

   In October 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion.
   Composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot — his
   marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne suffered from disordered
   nerves —The Waste Land is often read as a representation of the
   disillusionment of the post-war generation. Even before The Waste Land
   had been published as a book (December 1922), Eliot distanced himself
   from the poem's vision of despair: "As for The Waste Land, that is a
   thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward
   a new form and style" he wrote to Richard Aldington on November 15,
   1922. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem — its slippage between
   satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time;
   its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range
   of cultures and literatures--it has become a touchstone of modern
   literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year,
   James Joyce's Ulysses. Among its famous phrases are "April is the
   cruellest month"; "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and
   "Shantih shantih shantih," the utterance in Sanskrit which closes the
   poem.

   When the facsimile edition of the original manuscript for The Waste
   Land was published in 1974, it was revealed that Ezra Pound's redaction
   of the work was quite substantial. The poem is dedicated to Pound, whom
   Eliot calls il miglior fabbro "the better craftsman", a quotation from
   Dante.

   Eliot's work was hailed by the W.H. Auden generation of 1930s poets. On
   one occasion Auden read out loud the whole of The Waste Land to a
   social gathering. The publication of the draft manuscript of the poem
   in 1972 showed the strong influence of Ezra Pound upon its final form,
   before which it had been entitled "He Do the Police in Different
   Voices". Part IV, Death by Water, was reduced to its current 10 lines
   from an original 92 — Pound advised against Eliot's thought of
   scrapping it altogether. Eliot thanked Pound for "helping one to do it
   in one's own way".

Ash Wednesday

   Ash Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927
   conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, this poem deals with the
   struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives
   to move towards God.

   Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", Ash Wednesday, with
   a base of Dante's Purgatorio, is richly but ambiguously allusive and
   deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for
   human salvation. The style is different from his poetry which predates
   his conversion. Ash Wednesday and the poems that followed had a more
   casual, melodic, and contemplative method.

   Many critics were "particularly enthusiastic concerning Ash Wednesday",
   while in other quarters it was not well received . Among many of the
   more secular literati its groundwork of orthodox Christianity was
   discomfiting. Edwin Muir maintained that “Ash Wednesday is one of the
   most moving poems he has written, and perhaps the most perfect.”

Four Quartets

   Although many critics preferred his earlier work, Eliot and many other
   critics considered Four Quartets his masterpiece and it is the work
   which led to his receipt of the Nobel Prize. The Four Quartets draws
   upon his knowledge of mysticism and philosophy. It consists of four
   long poems, published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker
   (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942), each in five
   sections. Although they resist easy characterisation, each begins with
   a rumination on the geographical location of its title, and each
   meditates on the nature of time in some important respect — theology,
   historical, physical — and its relation to the human condition. Also,
   each is associated with one of the four classical elements: air, earth,
   water, and fire. They approach the same ideas in varying but
   overlapping ways, and are open to a diversity of interpretations.

   Burnt Norton asks what it means to consider things that might have
   been. We see the shell of an abandoned house, and Eliot toys with the
   idea that all these "merely possible" realities are present together,
   but invisible to us: All the possible ways people might walk across a
   courtyard add up to a vast dance we can't see; children who aren't
   there are hiding in the bushes.

   East Coker continues the examination of time and meaning, focusing in a
   famous passage on the nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness
   Eliot continues to reassert a solution ("I said to my soul, be still,
   and wait without hope").

   The Dry Salvages treats the element of water, via images of river and
   sea. It again strives to contain opposites ("…the past and future/Are
   conquered, and reconciled").

   "Little Gidding" (the element of fire) is the most anthologized of the
   Quartets. Eliot's own experiences as an air raid warden in The Blitz
   power the poem, and he imagines meeting Dante during the German
   bombing. The beginning of the Quartets ("Houses…/Are removed,
   destroyed") had become a violent everyday experience; this creates an
   animation, where for the first time he talks of Love — as the driving
   force behind all experience. From this background, the Quartets end
   with an affirmation of Julian of Norwich "all shall be well and/All
   manner of things shall be well".

   The Four Quartets cannot be understood without reference to Christian
   thought, traditions, and history. Eliot draws upon the theology, art,
   symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, St. John of the Cross
   and Julian of Norwich. The "deeper communion" sought in Burnt Norton,
   the "hints" and whispers of children, the sickness that must grow worse
   in order to find healing, and the exploration which inevitably leads us
   home all point to the pilgrim's path along the road of sanctification.

Other works

   An important member of the New Criticism, Eliot is considered by some
   to be one of the great literary critics of the 20th century. His essays
   were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical
   poets. A preoccupation with Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama (for
   instance, John Webster, who is mentioned in his poem Whispers of
   Immortality) is also central to his critical writing, and greatly
   influenced his own forays into drama.

   Eliot's plays, mostly in verse, include Sweeney Agonistes (1925),
   Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail
   Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman
   (1958). Murder in the Cathedral is about the death of Thomas Becket.
   Eliot admitted being influenced by, among others, the works of 17th
   century preacher Lancelot Andrewes. The dramatic works of Eliot are
   less well known than his poems, but worth investigating, eg in the
   recorded version of The Cocktail Party with Sir Alec Guinness in the
   lead role of An Unidentified Guest (Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly). Murder
   in the Cathedral has been a standard choice for Anglican and Roman
   Catholic curricula for many years.

   In his critical and theoretical writing, Eliot is known for his
   advocacy of the " objective correlative," the notion that art should
   not be a personal expression, but should work through objective
   universal symbols. There is fierce critical debate over the pragmatic
   value of the objective correlative, and Eliot's failure to follow its
   dicta. It is claimed that there is evidence throughout his work of
   contrary practice (e.g. part II of The Waste Land in the section
   beginning "My nerves are bad tonight"); but of course the worth of the
   idea is by no means negated by alleged lapses in practice, here as
   elsewhere.

   In 1958 the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed Eliot (and also C.S.
   Lewis) to a commission which resulted in "The Revised Psalter" (1963).
   In 1939, he published a book of poetry for children, Old Possum's Book
   of Practical Cats — "Old Possum" being a name Pound had bestowed upon
   him. After his death, this work became the basis of the hit West End
   and Broadway musical by Andrew Loyd Webber, Cats.

Criticism of Eliot

   Eliot's poetry was first criticized as not being poetry at all. Another
   criticism has been of his widespread interweaving of quotes from other
   authors into his work. "Notes on the Waste Land," which follows after
   the poem, gives the source of many of these, but not all. This practice
   has been defended as a necessary salvaging of tradition in an age of
   fragmentation, and completely integral to the work, as well adding
   richness through unexpected juxtaposition. It has also been condemned
   as showing a lack of originality, and for plagiarism. A prominent
   critic once published an essay called 'Eliot's Poetry of
   Pseudo-Learning'. Eliot himself once wrote ("The Sacred Wood"):
   "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they
   take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least
   something different."

   Canadian academic Robert Ian Scott pointed out that the title of The
   Waste Land and some of the images had previously appeared in the work
   of a minor Kentucky poet, Madison Cawein (1865–1914). Bevis Hillier
   compared Cawein's lines "...come and go/Around its ancient portico"
   with Eliot's "…come and go/talking of Michelangelo." Cawein's "Waste
   Land" had appeared in the January 1913 issue of Chicago magazine Poetry
   (which contained an article by Ezra Pound on London poets). But
   scholars are continually finding new sources for Eliot's "Waste Land,"
   often in odd places.

   Many famous fellow writers and critics have paid tribute to Eliot.
   According to the poet Ted Hughes, "Each year Eliot's presence reasserts
   itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find
   itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble." Hugh Kenner
   commented, "He has been the most gifted and influential literary critic
   in English in the twentieth century." C. S. Lewis, however, thought his
   poetry ludicrous, and his literary criticism "superficial and
   unscholarly".

Charges of anti-Semitism

   Although he is regarded throughout the English-speaking world as one of
   the chief poets and critics of modern times, he has sometimes been
   charged with anti-Semitism. The poem " Gerontion" contains a negative
   portrayal of a greedy landlord known as the "Jew [who] squats on the
   window sill." Another much-quoted example of anti-Semitism in his work
   is the poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar", in
   which Eliot implicitly finds the Jews responsible for the decline of
   Venice ("The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the
   lot"). In "A Cooking Egg", he writes, "The red-eyed scavengers are
   creeping | From Kentish Town and Golder's Green" ( Golders Green was a
   largely Jewish suburb of London). And this from " Sweeney Among the
   Nightingales" is the most ambiguous instance in his verse: "Rachel née
   Rabinovitch, | Tears at the grapes with murderous paws." Even so,
   Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia Woolf, who was himself Jewish and a
   friend of Eliot's, judged that Eliot was probably "slightly
   anti-Semitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon. He would
   have denied it quite genuinely."

   Discussion of Eliot's prejudices was suppressed for many years by
   certain of his survivors. Recent biography, however, has accepted
   Eliot's anti-Semitism, along with his misogyny, as fact rather than
   conjecture, noting that many in his milieu successfully eschewed such
   views.

   In his minor work "After Strange Gods" (1933), Eliot deprecates the
   presence of "free-thinking Jews," who are said to be "undesirable" in
   large numbers. The philosopher George Boas, who had previously been on
   friendly terms with Eliot, wrote to him that, "I can at least rid you
   of the company of one." Eliot did not reply. In later years Eliot
   expressed his regret over these remarks (disavowing the book, and
   refusing to allow any part to be reprinted), saying he was not in good
   health when he gave the lectures in which they were first expressed.

   Eliot also wrote a letter to the Daily Mail in January 1932 which
   congratulated the paper for a series of laudatory articles on the rise
   of Mussolini. In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) he says "…
   totalitarianism can retain the terms 'freedom' and 'democracy' and give
   them its own meaning: and its right to them is not so easily disproved
   as minds inflamed by passion suppose." In the same book, written before
   World War II, he says of J. F. C. Fuller, who worked for the Policy
   Directorate in the British Union of Fascists:

     Fuller… believes that Britain "must swim with the out-flowing tide
     of this great political change" [ie. to a system of fascist
     government]. From my point of view, General Fuller has as good a
     title to call himself a "believer in democracy" as anyone else. …I
     do not think I am unfair to the report [that a ban against married
     women Civil Servants should be removed because it embodied Nazism],
     in finding the implication that what is Nazi is wrong, and need not
     be discussed on its own merits.

   In 2003 Professor Ronald Schuchard of Emory University published
   details of a previously unknown cache of letters from Eliot to Horace
   Kallen, which reveal that in the early 1940s Eliot was actively helping
   Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria to re-settle in Britain and
   America. In letters written after the war, Eliot also voiced support
   for modern Israel.

Recognition

Formal recognition

     * Order of Merit (awarded by King George VI (United Kingdom), 1948)
     * Nobel Prize for Literature "for his outstanding, pioneer
       contribution to present-day poetry" (Stockholm, 1948)
     * Officier de la Legion d'Honneur (1951)
     * Hanseatic Goethe Prize (Hamburg, 1955)
     * Dante Medal ( Florence, 1959)
     * Commandeur de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres, (1960)
     * Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964)
     * 13 honorary doctorates (including Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne,
       and Harvard)
     * Two posthumous Tony Awards (1983) for his poems used in the musical
       Cats
     * Eliot College of the University of Kent, England, named after him
     * Celebrated on commemorative postage stamps
     * Has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame

Popular recognition

Literature (etc.)

     * In 1941, Henry Reed published Chard Whitlow, an intelligent and
       witty satire on Burnt Norton. Eliot wrote, "Most parodies of one's
       own work strike one as very poor. In fact, one is apt to think one
       could parody oneself much better. (As a matter of fact, some
       critics have said that I have done so.) But there is one which
       deserves the success it has had, Henry Reed's Chard Whitlow."
     * "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a greatly quoted and
       referenced piece. References have appeared in Hill Street Blues and
       The Long Goodbye by detective novelist Raymond Chandler.
     * In the movie Apocalypse Now, based on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart
       of Darkness, one of the side-characters, a photographer obsessed
       with the life of the elusive Colonel Kurtz, quotes "The Love Song
       of J. Alfred Prufrock," specifically the lines, "I should have been
       a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent
       seas." Marlon Brando's character Kurtz later reads Eliot's poem The
       Hollow Men: "We are the Hollow Men, / We are the stuffed men...".
       Eliot's poem The Hollow Men quotes Heart of Darkness in its
       epigraph — "Mistah Kurtz—he dead." The American photojournalist (
       Dennis Hopper) also refers to the end of The Hollow Men when
       speaking to Willard.
     * In the autobiographical A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken's
       admiration for Eliot's poetry lends credibility in Vanauken's eyes
       to Christianity and plays a part, along with letters from C. S.
       Lewis, in his conversion.
     * A favorite of present-day Christians is "Choruses from 'The Rock',"
       a poem decrying what Eliot saw as the decadence of Western thought
       from the sublime (the Word as the Revelation of God, wisdom, life)
       to the humdrum (information, living).
     * Novelist Dean Koontz often refers to Eliot: his 2004 novel The
       Taking is heavily influenced by Eliot's work and quotes extensively
       from it.
     * On September 20, 2005, a series of unpublished letters from Eliot
       and an author-inscribed first edition of The Waste Land plus many
       related items were sold at auction for nearly $438,000.
     * The musical CATS by Andrew Lloyd Webber is based on Eliot's Old
       Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
     * Stephen King's Dark Tower series makes references to The Waste
       Land. The third novel is even titled The Waste Lands.
     * The T.V. movie of Stephen King's The Stand begins with the
       quotation of Eliot of "This is the way the world ends, This is the
       way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang
       but a whimper."
     * In the opening of his novel On the Beach, Nevil Shute quotes the
       final lines of The Hollow Men. The novel takes its name from the
       tenth stanza.
     * Iain M. Banks's novels Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward derive
       their titles from The Waste Land.
     * In Kurt Vonnegut's 1985 novel " Galapagos", the book's invention,
       Mandarax, quotes Eliot: "In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut,
       flowering Judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among
       whispers..."

   In Catch 22 he is mentioned when Col. Cargill says "name one poet who
   makes money." Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen calls him without identifying
   himself and says "T.S. Eliot." There is later a T.S. Eliot phone tag
   between other Colonel and Generals.

Songs

     * The Manic Street Preachers song "My Guernica" includes the line
       "Alfred J. Prufrock would be proud of me"
     * The Simon and Garfunkel song "The Dangling Conversation," famously
       covered by Joan Baez, is in some ways a reinterpretation of "The
       Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
     * The band Crash Test Dummies released a song called " Afternoons &
       Coffeespoons" from the album God Shuffled His Feet in the early
       1990s. This song, too, borrows from and pays homage to "The Love
       Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
     * The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was also referred to by Chuck D
       of the seminal rap group Public Enemy, in Niggativaty, Do I Dare
       Disturb the Universe, on his solo album The Autobiography of
       Mistachuck.
     * The band Circle Takes the Square uses lines from several Eliot's
       poems in many of their songs, i.e. Patchwork Neurology ("Do I dare
       disturb universe" from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) or A
       Crater To Cough In ("I who have sat by Thebes below the wall and
       walked among the lowest of the dead (to Carthage then I came)" from
       The Waste Land)
     * Liverpool poet Adrian Henri included "Poem in Memoriam T.S. Eliot"
       in the best-selling 1968 anthology The Mersey Sound.
     * In Bob Dylan's song " Desolation Row", Ezra Pound and Eliot fight
       in the captain's tower.
     * In Melbourne band TISM's song "Mistah Eliot - He Wanker," there are
       numerous references to T. S. Eliot. One such line is; "T. S. Eliot
       lost his wallet when he went into town/Serves him right for hangin'
       round with the likes of Ezra Pound."
     * London rock band Million Dead's album 'A Song to Ruin' was greatly
       influenced by "The Waste Land", especially the 14 minute closer to
       the album, 'The Rise and Fall'.
     * Canadian singer Sarah Slean wrote a song about T. S. Eliot, simply
       entitled "Eliot."
     * Tori Amos's song Pretty Good Year from 1994's Under The Pink album
       features the lines, "I heard the Eternal Footman/Bought himself a
       bike to race". The Eternal Footman comes from Eliot's " The Love
       Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", where it symbolises death.
     * In the song "Time Waits For No One", the 70/80's pop band Ambrosia
       uses the line "With decisions and revisions which a minute will
       reverse" from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
     * In the song "The Chemicals Between Us", the British alternative
       rock band Bush makes reference to "The Hollow Men" in the line,
       "we're of hollow men we are the naked ones".
     * [Norma Jean]'s song Disconecktie is literally a reworded rendition
       of Eliot's "Choruses from the rock"
     * Leeds rock band The Third take their name from the stanza in The
       Waste Land beginning "Who is the third who walks always beside
       you?". They often use a recorded reading of this by Scottish poet
       Johnny Solstice over an electronica piece as introductory music to
       their live sets.
     * The Allman Brothers Band titled their well-known 1972 album Eat A
       Peach, from the line "Do I dare to eat a peach?" from The Love Song
       of J. Alfred Prufrock. This was also a reference to their Georgia
       roots.
     * East River Pipe, a musical project of Fred Cornog, has a song
       titled "What Does T.S. Eliot Know About You?" on his 2006 Merge
       Records release What Are You On?
     * The screamo band Circle Takes The Square directly quote The Waste
       Land in "A Crater To Cough In", and reference the poem many times
       throughout their full-length As The Roots Undo.
     * King Crimson's "The Deception of the Thrush" takes its title from
       the Eliot Poem "Burnt Norton" and the lyrics are sampled from a
       reading of "The Waste Land". There are no set selections from the
       poem, however, because it changes every night. It tends to be from
       part one, The Burial of the Dead

Other

     * There is a blue plaque on one at the north west corner of Russell
       Square in London, commemorating the fact that T. S. Eliot worked
       there for many years while he was the poetry editor for the
       publisher Faber & Faber.

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