T.S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot, was born into a prominent Unitarian family in Saint Louis (1888). He was fond of his childhood, and he liked to watch steamboats going up the Mississippi River. He adored his Irish nurse, Annie, who brought him to church and talked to him about God. He loved to read, especially the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. He was a bird watcher and could identify more than 70 kinds of birds.
But he didn't have many friends as a boy, and he also had trouble making friends at Harvard, where he went to college. He joined some clubs and went to dances and parties here and there. He lifted weights to try to improve his appearance. But in the end, he remained somewhat of a recluse.
After Harvard, Eliot moved to England, where he got a job as a banker. He was a fastidious worker, arriving at 9:30 and leaving at 5:30 every day, working one Saturday every month. He ate lunch every day at the same restaurant, called Baker's Chop House. He met and married a 26-year-old ballet dancer named Vivienne Haigh-Wood. They had known each other for only three months, and didn't ever become completely comfortable with each other. They slept in separate rooms, and Eliot couldn't bring himself to shave in front of her. A few years into their marriage, he joined the Church of England and took a vow of chastity.
From a young age, Eliot wrote about moral decay and getting old and the hopelessness of life, and he expressed those feelings in his most famous poem, The Waste Land (1922), a long dark poem about the search for redemption in a post-World War I world.
After he divorced, Eliot had other women who loved him and wanted to marry him. Eliot said that living with a woman was a "nightmare" and something that didn't interest him. But when he was almost 70, he secretly married his 30-year-old secretary, Valerie.
Eliot and his wife were together all the time, and she made him very happy. He never left her side, and he wrote her a letter every week. They sat at home together, playing Scrabble over cheese and Scotch whiskey. His health was failing, but he brought her on a trip to the United States—to Texas and New York and Boston. They went out dancing at a boat party thrown by some Harvard students. He started telling practical jokes and became fond of whoopee cushions and exploding cigars. He wrote a fan letter to Groucho Marx, who wrote back, and the two became close pen pals.
Eliot said, "This last part of my life is the best, in excess of anything I could have deserved."
The Waste-Land published 1922
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.
II. A GAME OF CHESS
THE Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
III. THE FIRE SERMON
THE river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank.
IV. DEATH BY WATER
PHLEBAS the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell
And the profit and loss.
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
AFTER the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
*In my beginning is my end.
*You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends, and how, how rare and strange it is, to find in a life composed so much of odds and ends… to find a friend who has these qualities, who has, and gives those qualities upon which friendship lives. How much it means that I say this to you -without these friendships - life, what cauchemar!
*You are the music while the music lasts.
*What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
*When a Cat adopts you there is nothing to be done about it except put up with it until the wind changes.
*I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
*If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
*Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
*Humankind cannot stand very much reality.
*Humor is also a way of saying something serious.
*I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.
*Success is relative. It is what we can make of the mess we have made of things.
*The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.
*Whatever you think, be sure it is what you think; whatever you want, be sure that is what you want; whatever you feel, be sure that is what you feel.
*Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
*We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
*Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
*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.
No comments:
Post a Comment