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
attitude struggle may
Religion, as distinguished from modern paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature. It may be observed that the natural life and the supernatural life have a conformity to each other which neither has with the mechanistic life...A wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God...[We should] struggle to recover the sense of relation to nature and to God.
heart mind may
My mind may be American but my heart is British.
real may turns
Unreal friendship may turn to real But real friendship, once ended, cannot be mended
life thinking may
The fool,fixed in his folly,may think He can turn the wheel on which he turns.
mean poetry may
What a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it means to the author; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may become merely reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his original meaning.
running writing may
Writing every day is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it.
war may ignored
War is not a life: it is a situation, one which may neither be ignored nor accepted.
self may patterns
History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.
doors way may
There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.
games careers may
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
poetry feelings may
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
questions steel surgeon wounded
The wounded surgeon plies the steel / That questions the distempered part.
edge river sea within
The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also
beyond communication dead death fire language speech
And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.