T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot OMwas an American-born British essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "one of the twentieth century's major poets". He moved to England in 1914 at age 25, settling, working and marrying there. He was eventually naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39, renouncing his American citizenship...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth26 September 1888
CountryUnited States of America
teaching reality too-much
Humankind can't stand too much reality.
feelings felt
With a poem you can say 'I got my feeling into words for myself. I now have the equivalent in words for that much of what I have felt.'
tired dying mortality
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
loneliness thinking talking
Everyone's alone - or so it seems to me. They make noises, and think they are talking to each other; They make faces, and think they understand each other. And I'm sure they don't. Is that a delusion?
phrases ends epitaph
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, every poem an epitaph.
people events happened
People to whom nothing has ever happened cannot understand the unimportance of events.
risk curious should
The old should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.
names faces firsts
He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing; and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon.
spring sunset paris
Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful afterall
loathing admiration efficiency
I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.
jealous pay should
If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God), you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.
food winter smell
The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways.
people wish want
People are only influenced in the direction in which they want to go, and influence consists largely in making them conscious of their wishes to proceed in that direction.
all-time ifs
If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable