T.S. Eliot wrote many a somber verse, but he was quite the biting wit. Here are some quotes and factoids about the poet.
Quotes about T.S.E....
"I've asked the poet T.S. Eliot to dine with me...and he's a very nice creature".
--Aldous Huxley to Naomi Mitchison, May 1917
"That strange figure Eliot dined here last night. I feel that he has taken the veil, or whatever monks do...Tom, though infinitely considerate [of his wife], is also perfectly detached. His cell, is I'm sure, a very lofty one, but a little chilly. We have the oddest conversations: I can't help loosing some figure of speech, which Tom pounces on and utterly destroys."
--Virginia Woolf to Roger Fry, May 18, 1923.
"Edith Wharton found...[Prufrock] extremely 'amusing'...but relatively insignificant and interesting mainly as revealing the influence of Whitman...The Waste Land...seemed to her to lack even the enlivening presence of Walt Whitman; it was a poem, like Joyce's novel [Ulysses] ridden by theory rather than warmed by life."
--R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton, pg. 442 (1922)
"Ezra [Pound] lent Ernest [Hemingway] a copy of T. S. Eliot's new poem, The Waste Land...Ernest was unable to take it seriously"
--Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, pg. 102 (1923)
"T. S. Eliot had come to Paris about then, appearing at the Dome and other bars in top hat, cutaway, and striped trousers. It was intended as a gesture of contempt and received as just that."
--William Carlos Williams, Autobiography (quoting diary entry) pg. 217 (1924)
"Now confidential: T.S. Eliot, for whom you know my profound admiration--I think he's the greatest living poet in any language--wrote me he read [The Great] Gatsby three times and thought it was the first step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, 20 Feb. 1924
"We stopped on the way at Oxford and bought a waist coat and some books--including T.S. Eliot's poems which seems to me marvellously good but very hard to understand. There is a most impressive flavour of the major prophets about them."
--Evelyn Waugh, Diaries, pg. 242 (1926)
"Eliot and I have our similarities and our differences. We are both poets and we both like to play. That's the similarity. The difference is this: I like to play euchre. He likes to play Eucharist."
--Conversational remarks of Robert Frost, reported in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, pg. 321 (1940)
"I went over to Marlow the other day and saw Eliot and his wife who have taken a house there. Eliot in excellent form, and his wife too; I rather like her; she is such a genuine person, vulgar, but with no attempt to conceal her vulgarity."
--Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley, June 28, 1918.
Quotes by TSE:
"The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality...The poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. The emotion of art is impersonal."
"[The poet must be equipped with] the historical sense...nearly indispensible to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyone his twenty-fifth year...a perception not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence...[For] unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living."
"The poetry of Dante is the one universal school of style for the writing of poetry in any language. And the less we know of a poet before we read him, the better. For the poem is a thing in itself, and should be enjoyed even before it is understood."
When Virginia Woolf lamented that "We're not as good as Keats", Eliot replied, "Yes we are...We're trying something harder".
"The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."
"Humanism [is only] a product--a by-product--of Protestant theology in its last agonies."
"Bad poets borrow, good poets steal."
"In the case of many poets, the most important thing for them to do...is to write as little as possible."
"Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome."
"I do not believe that any writer has ever exposed this bovaryisme, the human will to see things as they are not, more clearly than Shakespeare."
His opinion of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus: "One of the stupidest and most uninspiring plays ever written."
On Hamlet: "So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed."
Gossip about Viv's affair with Bertrand Russell:
From Peter Ackroyd's T.S. Eliot: A Life, pg. 84:
Russell would have lunch and dinner with Viv when TSE was working: "This was to prove a less than ideal arrangement, however, since, on one occasion...Russell broke his self-imposed vow of paternalism and acceding, perhaps to her requests made love to Vivienne--at least this is what he claimed in a letter to his mistress, Lady Constance Malleson. The experience, however, was 'hellish and loathsome. He disguised his antipathy and she seemed satisfied, but since then he had awful nightmares that strip his self-evasions'. He did not explain why it was quite so 'loathsome', although no doubt Viv's own physical problems had something to do with it. It was the pointless and messy end of what had been an intense but "platonic" relationship and the intimacy between Viv and Russell came to an end."
From Robert Sencourt's T.S. Eliot: A Memoir, pg. 59:
"Thus, at the time when Tom and Vivienne were [Russell's] guests, [Russell] had slipped out of a relationship with Lady Ottoline and had not yet entered into another. He mentions, too, that for a whole year he was looking for a woman to replace his former mistress, but without success. It was at this time that Russell became particularly close to the Eliot's. He was particularly taken with the vivacious and attractive Vivienne."
From T.S. Matthew's Great Tom: Notes towards the Definition of T.S. Eliot, pg. 47:
"Did Russell seduce Vivienne, and was Eliot, at least for a time, unaware of the fact? The probable answer to both questions, in the light of the circumstantial evidence and of the characters concerned is Yes. How could Vivienne, married only a few months and supposedly much in love with her husband, have taken part in so cruel an adultery? One possible answer is that she was a flirt, and flirts sometimes go too far, sometimes get themselves into situations they can't get out of; sometimes a determined seducer is one too many for them."
Some trivia about T.S.E....
Actress Meg Ryan's film production company is named Prufrock Pictures after her favorite poem. The movie I.Q. was produced under Prufrock Pictures.
The Broadway musical Cats has songs based on Eliot's homage to felines Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
The 1994 movie Tom and Viv is based on the relationship between Eliot and his wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood starring Willem Dafoe as TSE and Miranda Richardson as Viv.
Get your own Free Home Page