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“... make even readers who have no time for poetry stop dead in their tracks.’ It’s true that T.S. Eliot said, in ‘East Coker’, that ‘the poetry does not matter,’ but he can’t have been pushing for stuff like this: His mouth and his throat were foul cotton. God, he felt rotten! Or: His mouth twitched: He was dangerously still, By an enormous power ...”

“... and murder, knows its own strength. The strength is essentially dramatic, but decanted. T.S. Eliot envied the Jacobean dramatists: The ideal condition is that under which everything, except what only the individual genius can supply, is provided for the poet. A framework is provided. We do not mean ‘plot’; a poet may incorporate, adapt or invent as ...”

“... what the editor describes as ‘the most comprehensive collection of contemporary reviews of T.S. Eliot’s work as it appeared’. There are other such collections, but this one will be enough for most people. The editor is American, and she is contributing to a series which gives the same treatment to Emerson, Edith Wharton, Ellen ...”

“... in the history of early Modernism centres on Ezra Pound’s attempt to ‘liberate’ T.S. Eliot from his clerk’s job at Lloyds Bank. In 1921, Pound started up a fund called Bel Esprit and set about trying to persuade 30 subscribers to fork out ten pounds each: £300 p.a. would, he believed, enable Eliot to forsake ...”

“... which the BBC published to accompany the series gave me my first sight of the work of T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and I believe James Joyce, though I learn from the volume before me that Sir John Reith, reigning at the BBC, forbade Nicolson to mention Ulysses, then banned. Little encounters of that kind were to be expected in those days, and Nicolson ...”

“... Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common. These two works are in one way more alike than might ...”

“... inspection, the poems didn’t stand up. They’re not embarrassing – just too indebted to T.S. ...”

“... the role of pedagogue to undergraduates, taking his first job at Amherst College in 1917. Pound, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane all lived by other means; though it’s worth pointing out that the poetry and criticism of Eliot in particular, and to a lesser extent of ...”

“... inform and rebuke him. Heaney implicitly presented himself as kin to Dante or Aeneas, or to T.S. Eliot in Dantesque prophetic mode: a poet who could absorb and transform voices from his own and from the literary past. But he combined that self-aggrandisement with a powerful dose of guilt. The imperial poets Dante and Virgil were unsettling doubles for a poet ...”

“... word she wrote them. There survive a hundred letters to Ezra Pound and another hundred to T.S. Eliot; five hundred to the historical novelist Bryher (Winifred Ellerman) and sixty to Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), who was Bryher’s lover. Elizabeth Bishop, a favourite in later years, received more than two hundred, over a period of almost forty years. Faced with ...”

“... comes to the confirmed bachelor old friends find it difficult to take. Chums winced to see T.S. Eliot spooning with wife No 2, smirked when they brazenly held hands, and there was a bit of that with Auden. Look at it from the friends’ point of view. They have to budge up to make room for the new companion, knowing as they do so that they will be seeing ...”

“... What was T.S. Eliot’s favourite colour? Which season – summer, autumn, winter, spring – would you expect to feature most often in the works of Philip Larkin? And which of these two poets would you reckon was the more self-centred, fond of flowers, susceptible to hyphens, keen on using the word mother? Such are the questions that can spin off from too many hours spent browsing in the realms of the Concordance ...”

“... and re-inventing him according to our predilections. Franklin is a phenomenon very like what T.S. Eliot called a classic – entailing, to use Frank Kermode’s words in his book of that name, ‘the paradox that there is an identity but that it changes.’ Thus an American woman academic reviewing this book has drawn her readers’ attention to his marrying ...”

“... she was overworking frantically, sending out poem after poem, keeping critical projects on T.S. Eliot, Cardinal Newman and possibly the Book of Job all bubbling on the back-burner at the same time. Spark then became anorexic, using dexedrine as a substitute for regular meals. Her breakdown when it came appeared as a visitation from ...”

“... the middle years of the century. At this point I can no longer avoid mentioning the name of T.S. Eliot, to whom above all others Sisson appears to be indebted for his cultural frame of reference. Now, it’s well-known that, far from meeting the challenge posed by Eliot’s innovations, English poets as a whole nodded ...”