Literary Birthday – 26 September – T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 and died on 4 January 1965.

T.S. Eliot Quotes

1. Humour is also a way of saying something serious.
2. Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.
3. 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.
4. Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
5. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
6. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.
7. […] we must remember that what a writer does to people is not necessarily what he intends to do. It may be only what people are capable of having done to them.
8. We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.
9. The Nobel is a ticket to one’s own funeral. No one has ever done anything after he got it.
10. It’s strange that words are so inadequate. Yet, like the asthmatic struggling for breath, so the lover must struggle for words.

Unforgettable Lines from T.S. Eliot’s Poetry 

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.

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.



In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

April is the cruellest month, breeding  
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing  
Memory and desire, stirring  
Dull roots with spring rain.

T.S. Eliot was an award-winning English poet, publisher, essayist, playwright, and literary critic. He is known as the most important English poet of the 20th century. He believed that poetry should represent the complexities of modern civilization. Born an American, he was naturalised as a British subject in 1927. His most famous poem is The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Other poems include The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, The Journey of the Magi, and Four Quartets. He founded and edited the influential literary journal, Criterion (1922–1939). In 1939, Eliot published a book of light verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. After his death, the book was the basis of the musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 ‘for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry’. Many of his words inspired authors when they were naming their books. We hope you enjoy this post – 10 TS Eliot quotes used as book titles.

Image: Thomas Stearns Eliot with his sister and his cousin by Lady Ottoline Morrell.jpg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas_Stearns_Eliot_by_Lady_Ottoline_Morrell_(1934).jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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