T.S. Eliot

The legacy of American-midwesterner-turned-high-church-Brit Thomas Stearns Eliot is in one sense a limited one -- very few have taken up his style of dry, chanted lines, blank except for the occasional whimsical, almost Seussical rhyme -- and yet at the same time, his influence has been enormous. This paradoxical situation was aptly summarized by a friend of mine some years ago in this bit of comic verse:

Mr. Eliot, beloved of Pound
Is riding his crafty go-cart 'round
While many a gifted latter-day poet
Is eating his dust -- they sure can't sow it.

This paradox is underwritten by Eliot's own, internal conflict; he famously described poetry not as the expression of emotion, but the escape from it. Perhaps as a result, there's a strange mixtures of tones in his best poems, combining a kind of unemotional dryness with a rich, sometimes biting wit. Both are on ample display in his early masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." But don't take my word for it: give it a listen. There's no better way to experience Eliot.

As to the "Hollow Men" -- try this annotated version -- here we have Eliot at his driest. The epigraph comes from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where the insane colonizer Kurtz, after scribbling "kill them all" in his notebook, has met his ignominious end; the novel was freely adapted by Frances Ford Coppolla as Apocalypse Now!, the setting changed to the Cambodian jungle, with Marlon Brando in the role of Kurtz (you can hear Brando recite the poem here).

Not that Eliot was without his lighter side -- his whimsical Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats became the basis of the long-running Broadway musical Cats. Late in life, Eliot even had the chance to dine with one of his favorite actors, Groucho Marx. The two men had exchanged fan photos some years earlier, and when Groucho was next in London a dinner was arranged at the Eliots' flat. Groucho tried to impress Eliot with quotations from King Lear; Eliot was more interested in quoting old lines from the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup. Near the end of the evening, Groucho happened to mention that his daughter Melinda was studying Eliot's poetry at Beverly Hills High. Eliot, drily, replied that he was sorry to hear that, as he had "no wish to become compulsory reading."

And we all know how well that worked out.