T.S. Eliot

When I was an undergrad a professor once told me I wrote like T.S. Eliot. I chose to be flattered, whether or not that was his intent. My favorite lines from Eliot:

“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.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.”

― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

It’s the birthday of poet T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (books by this author). He was born in 1888 and spent the first 18 years of his life in St. Louis, Missouri with his prominent Unitarian family.

As a young man, Eliot was intelligent, hard-working, and intellectually eclectic. And as an undergraduate at Harvard University, he managed to finish both his undergraduate work and master’s degree in just four years. At college, Eliot began writing poetry and was something of a dandy — an Anglophile with a personal style of fussy, studied carelessness; his personality witty and precise and his speech free of slang or preciousness. Eliot finished his education as a graduate student at Harvard, studying philosophy under visiting professor Bertrand Russell and completing his Ph.D. thesis in 1914... WA