T. S. Eliot



Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was an American-born English poet, dramatist and literary critic. Noted for spiritual and religious themes in many of his poems, he converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism in 1927.
 * See also:
 * Four Quartets
 * Murder in the Cathedral
 * The Family Reunion
 * The Cocktail Party

Quotes



 * I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me.
 * "A Song for Simeon" from Collected Poems 1909-1962.

Around these images, and cling: The notion of some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing.'''
 * '''I am moved by fancies that are curled
 * "Preludes" (1917), § IV


 * 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.
 * "Philip Massinger", a biographical essay in The Sacred Wood (1920).


 * Atheism should always be encouraged (i.e. rationalistic not emotional atheism) for the sake of the Faith.
 * Letter to Richard Aldington (24 February, 1927). The Letters of T.S. Eliot: 1926-1927, p. 424.


 * Mr. Aldous Huxley, who is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one, has a certain natural — but little developed — aptitude for seriousness.
 * "The Contemporary English Novelist", La Nouvelle Revue française (1 May 1927).


 * A dangerous person to disagree with.
 * On Samuel Johnson in Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century (1927).


 * My general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.
 * "Preface" in For Lancelot Andrewes (1928).


 * It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
 * "Dante" (1929), in Selected Essays (1932), p. 238.


 * I am glad you have a Cat, but I do not believe it is So remarkable a cat as My Cat. My Cat is a Lilliecat Hubvously. What a lilliecat it is. There never was such a Lilliecat. Its Name is JELLYORUM and its one Idea is to be Usefull!!
 * Letter to his godson, Thomas Erle Faber (January 1931) as quoted in "T.S. Eliot's Private Letters To Faber Publishing Family To Be Sold" at World Collector's Net (12 August 2005).


 * Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
 * Preface to Transit of Venus: Poems by Harry Crosby (1931).


 * It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.
 * Letter to Marquis Childs quoted in St. Louis Post Dispatch (15 October 1930) and in the address "American Literature and the American Language" delivered at Washington University (9 June 1953) published in Washington University Studies, New Series: Literature and Language, no. 23 (St. Louis : Washington University Press, 1953), p. 6.


 * If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat may be the preface to our successors' victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that it will triumph.
 * "Francis Herbert Bradley" (1927), in Essays Ancient and Modern (1936).


 * The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.
 * "Religion and Literature" (1935), in Essays Ancient and Modern (1936).


 * When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.
 * "Religion and Literature" (1935), in Essays Ancient and Modern (1936).


 * It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
 * "Religion and Literature" (1935), in Essays Ancient and Modern (1936).


 * The division between those who accept, and those who deny, Christian revelation I take to be the most profound division between human beings.
 * "Revelation" (1937), in The Idea of a Christian Society and Other Writings (London: Faber and Faber, 1982), p. 168.


 * No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job.…Poetry…remains one person talking to another....no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is the master of the prosaic.
 * The Music of Poetry (24 February 1942) the third W. P. Ker memorial lecture delivered in the University of Glasgow


 * Fortunate the man who, at the right moment meets the right friend; fortunate also the man who at the right moment meets the right enemy. I do not approve the extermination of the enemy; the policy of exterminating or, as it is barbarously said, liquidating enemies, is one of the most alarming developments of modern war and peace, from the point of view of those who desire the survival of culture. One needs the enemy... A country within which the divisions have gone too far is a danger to itself: a country which is too well united - whether by nature or by device, by honest purpose or by fraud and oppression - is a menace to others.
 * Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948).


 * Long ago I studied the ancient Indian languages, and while I was chiefly interested at that time in philosophy, I read a little poetry too; and I know that my own poetry shows the influence of Indian thought and sensibility.
 * Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), quoted in Gewali, Salil (2013). Great Minds on India. New Delhi: Penguin Random House.


 * The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
 * Time (23 October 1950)


 * The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion.
 * Introduction to Pascal's Pensées (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958)


 * No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest—for it is a part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.
 * Quoted in Herbert Howarth, Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), p. 89


 * A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like school boys...
 * T.S. Eliot’s After Strange Gods as cited in (Kearns 1987, 13). Kearns, Cleo McNelly. 1987. T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press. quoted from Malhotra, R. & Viswanathan V. (2022). Snakes in the Ganga : Breaking India 2.0.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

 * Full text online (at Wikisource)



When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table.
 * Let us go then, you and I,

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

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;''' There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands, That lift and drop a question on your plate; '''Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea.'''
 * '''There will be time, there will be time

Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.''' 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; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room.
 * '''Do I dare
 * So how should I presume?

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
 * And I have known the eyes already, known them all —
 * And how should I presume?

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare [But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!] It is perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume?
 * And I have known the arms already, known them all —
 * And how should I begin?

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.'''
 * '''I should have been a pair of ragged claws

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.
 * I am no prophet — and here's no great matter;

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a Pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: "That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all."
 * It is impossible to say just what I mean!

Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous — Almost, at times, the Fool.
 * No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.''' Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. '''I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.''' I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. '''We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.'''
 * '''I grow old ... I grow old ...

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)

 * Later republished in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1922)


 * We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.


 * Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year...


 * The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.


 * No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism.


 * What happens when a new work of art is created, is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.


 * Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.


 * Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.


 * What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.


 * It is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts.


 * The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." 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.

Poems (1920)

 * Full text online





Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.'''
 * '''Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
 * "Gerontion"

The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness.
 * Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!"
 * "Gerontion"

An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob.
 * Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
 * "Gerontion"

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late What's not believed in, or if still believed, In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with Till the refusal propagates a fear. '''Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.'''
 * After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
 * "Gerontion"

We have not reached conclusion, when I Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last I have not made this show purposelessly And it is not by any concitation Of the backward devils. I would meet you upon this honestly. I that was near your heart was removed therefrom To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition. I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated?
 * The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
 * "Gerontion"


 * so the countess passed on until she came through the little park, where Niobe presented her with a cabinet, and so departed.
 * "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar"

Rests on his belly in the mud; Although he seems so firm to us He is merely flesh and blood.
 * The broad-backed hippopotamus
 * "The Hippopotamus"

And saw the skull beneath the skin
 * Webster was much possessed by death
 * "Whispers of Immortality"

Russian eye is underlined for emphasis; Uncorseted, her friendly bust Gives promise of pneumatic bliss.
 * Grishkin is nice: her
 * "Whispers of Immortality"; "Grishkin" has been identified by Ezra Pound as having been "Serafima Astafieva" a Russian dancer.

The Waste Land (1922)

 * Full text online (at Wikisource)



Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.
 * April is the cruellest month, breeding
 * Line 1 et seq.

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
 * There is shadow under this red rock
 * Line 25 et seq.

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
 * I was neither
 * Line 39 et seq.

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.
 * Unreal city,
 * Line 60 et seq.
 * This is a reference to Dante's Inferno, Canto III, lines 55-57

It's so elegant So intelligent
 * O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
 * Line 128 et seq.

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
 * O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
 * Line 320 et seq.

When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you
 * Who is the third who walks always beside you
 * Line 359 et seq.
 * Eliot's note: Stimulated by Shackleton's Antarctic expedition where the explorers at the extremity of their strength believed there was another who walked with them across South Georgia!

Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London Unreal
 * What is that sound high in the air
 * Line 367 et seq.


 * In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind's home.
 * Line 385 et seq.

DA ' Datta'': what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart '''The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed'''.
 * '''Then spoke the thunder

Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.
 * I have heard the key

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih
 * These fragments I have shored against my ruins
 * The final lines of the poem.

The Hollow Men (1925)



 * Mistah Kurtz — he dead
 * A quotation from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad


 * A penny for the Old Guy
 * A quotation of a traditional Guy Fawkes Night saying

We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw.'''
 * '''We are the hollow men

With direct eyes]], to death's other Kingdom Remember us — if at all — not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.'''
 * '''[[w:Purgatory|Those who have crossed

In death's dream kingdom´ These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind's singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star.'''
 * '''Eyes I dare not meet in dreams

This is cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star. [...] The eyes are not here There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valley''' This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms '''[http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#fiftysevensixty In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech ]Gathered on this beach of the tumid river [http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#sixtyonesixtytwo Sightless, unless The eyes reappear] [http://aduni.org/~heather/occs/honors/Notesonpoem.htm#sixtyfoursixtythree As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose] Of death's twilight kingdom The hope only Of empty men.'''
 * '''This is the dead land

And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow'''
 * '''Between the idea
 * For Thine is the Kingdom.

And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow'''
 * '''Between the conception
 * Life is very long.

And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow '''.
 * '''Between the desire

This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.'''
 * '''This is the way the world ends

Ash-Wednesday (1930)




Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things''' (Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?) Why should I mourn The vanished power of the usual reign?
 * '''Because I do not hope to turn again

The infirm glory of the positive hour Because I do not think Because I know I shall not know The one veritable transitory power Because I cannot drink There, where trees flower, and springs flow, for there is nothing again
 * Because I do not hope to know

And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place I rejoice that things are as they are and I renounce the blessèd face
 * Because I know that time is always time

Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something Upon which to rejoice
 * Because I cannot hope to turn again

For what is done, not to be done again May the judgement not be too heavy upon us'''
 * '''Let these words answer

But merely vans to beat the air The air which is now thoroughly small and dry Smaller and dryer than the will '''Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still.''' Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
 * Because these wings are no longer wings to fly

The wind will listen.'''
 * '''Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only

Calm and distressed Torn and most whole''' Rose of memory Rose of forgetfulness Exhausted and life-giving Worried reposeful '''The single Rose Is now the Garden Where all loves end ''' Terminate torment Of love unsatisfied The greater torment Of love satisfied End of the endless Journey to no end Conclusion of all that Is inconclusible '''Speech without word and Word of no speech Grace to the Mother For the Garden Where all love ends.'''
 * '''Lady of silences

Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.
 * This is the land which ye

The time.''' Redeem The unread vision in the higher dream While jewelled unicorns draw by the gilded hearse.
 * '''Redeem

If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word. O my people, what have I done unto thee. ''' Where shall the word be found, where will the word Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence'''
 * If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent

In this brief transit where the dreams cross The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
 * Wavering between the profit and the loss

In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices And the weak spirit quickens to rebel For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell Quickens to recover The cry of quail and the whirling plover And the blind eye creates The empty forms between the ivory gates And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth '''This is the time of tension between dying and birth The place of solitude where three dreams cross Between blue rocks ''' But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away Let the other yew be shaken and reply.
 * And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices

'''Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood Teach us to care and not to care'''
 * Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,

And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea, Suffer me not to be separated And let my cry come unto Thee.
 * Sister, mother

Choruses from The Rock (1934)


The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
 * The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,

O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons, O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying! '''The endless cycle of idea and action, Endless invention, endless experiment, Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness; Knowledge of speech, but not of silence; Knowledge of words, and ignorance of The Word.''' All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance, All our ignorance brings us nearer to death, But nearness to death no nearer to God. '''Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?''' The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.
 * O perpetual revolution of configured stars,

Or ceaseless idleness, which is still harder, Or irregular labour, which is not pleasant. I have trodden the winepress alone, and I know That it is hard to be really useful, resigning The things that men count for happiness, seeking The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting With equal face those that bring ignominy, The applause of all or the love of none. All men are ready to invest their money But most expect dividends. '''I say to you: Make perfect your will. I say: take no thought of the harvest, But only of proper sowing.'''
 * The lot of man is ceaseless labor,

But one thing does not change. In all of my years, one thing does not change, However you disguise it, this thing does not change: The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.'''
 * '''The world turns and the world changes,

The desert is not remote in southern tropics The desert is not only around the corner, '''The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you, The desert is in the heart of your brother.'''
 * You neglect and belittle the desert.


 * Let me show you the work of the humble. Listen.

We will build with new bricks'''
 * '''In the vacant places

We will build with new stone Where the beams are rotten We will build with new timbers Where the word is unspoken '''We will build with new speech There is work together A Church for all And a job for each Every man to his work.'''
 * Where the bricks are fallen

There is not life that is not in community, And no community not lived in praise of GOD.
 * What life have you, if you have not life together?

And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance, But all dash to and fro in motor cars, Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.'''
 * '''And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,


 * Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore.

Between futile speculation and unconsidered action.
 * I have given you the power of choice, and you only alternate

Their only monument the asphalt road And a thousand lost golf balls." '''
 * '''And the wind shall say: "Here were decent godless people:

Do you huddle close together because you love each other?" What will you answer? "We all dwell together To make money from each other"? or "This is a community"?
 * When the Stranger says: "What is the meaning of this city ?

Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.'''
 * '''Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.

Life you may evade, but Death you shall not. You shall not deny the Stranger.
 * There is one who remembers the way to your door:

From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.''' But the man that is shall shadow The man that pretends to be.
 * '''They constantly try to escape

Through the Passion and Sacrifice saved in spite of their negative being; Bestial as always before, carnal, self seeking as always before, selfish and purblind as ever before, Yet always struggling, always reaffirming,always resuming their march on the way that was lit by the light; Often halting, loitering, straying, delaying, returning, yet following no other way.
 * Then it seemed as if men must proceed from light to light, in the light of the Word,

Men have left GOD not for other gods, they say, but for no God; and this has never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic.
 * But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before: though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where.


 * What have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards in an age which advances progressively backwards?

And the holy places defiled; Peter the Hermit, scourging with words. '''And among his hearers were a few good men, Many who were evil, And most who were neither, Like all men in all places.'''
 * There came one who spoke of the shame of Jerusalem

the broken standards, the broken lives, The broken faith in one place or another, '''There was something left that was more than the tales Of old men on winter evenings.'''
 * In spite of all the dishonour,

And moderate vice
 * Our age is an age of moderate virtue


 * The soul of Man must quicken to creation.

Joined with the artist's eye, new life, new form, new colour. Out of the sea of sound the life of music, Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions, Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings, There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation.
 * Out of the meaningless practical shapes of all that is living or lifeless


 * The work of creation is never without travail

Light The visible reminder of Invisible Light.'''
 * '''Light

Too bright for mortal vision.
 * O Light Invisible, we praise Thee!

O Light Invisible, we glorify Thee!
 * We see the light but see not whence it comes.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)


It isn't just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
 * The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
 * The Naming of Cats

Then the Gumbie Cat's work is but hardly begun.
 * When the day's hustle and bustle is done,
 * The Old Gumbie Cat

And there isn't any call for me to shout it: For he will do As he do do And there's no doing anything about it!
 * Yes the Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat —
 * The Rum Tum Tugger

Jellicle Cats come one come all: The Jellicle Moon is shining bright — Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball.
 * Jellicle Cats come out tonight,
 * The Song of the Jellicles

He's a Cat who has lived many lives in succession.''' He was famous in proverb and famous in rhyme A long while before Queen Victoria's accession.
 * '''Old Deuteronomy's lived a long time;
 * Old Deuteronomy

Well I never! Was there ever A Cat so clever As Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!
 * And we all say: OH!
 * Mr. Mistoffelees

For when they reach the scene of crime — Macavity's not there!
 * He's the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's despair:
 * Macavity: The Mystery Cat

He's broken every human law, he breaks the law of gravity.'''
 * '''Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
 * Macavity: The Mystery Cat

At whatever time the deed took place- Macavity wasn't there.
 * He always has an alibi, and one or two to spare:
 * Macavity: The Mystery Cat

For he's a fiend in feline shape, a monster of depravity. You may meet him in a by-street, you may see him in the square — But when a crime's discovered, then Macavity's not there!
 * Macavity, Macavity, there's no one like Macavity,
 * Macavity: The Mystery Cat

(I might mention Mungojerrie, I might mention Griddlebone) Are nothing more than agents for the Cat who all the time Just controls their operations: the Napoleon of Crime!
 * They say that all the Cats whose wicked deeds are widely known
 * Macavity: The Mystery Cat

But there's nothing to equal, from what I hear tell, That moment of mystery When I made history As Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
 * These modern productions are all very well,
 * Gus: The Theatre Cat

That Cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind. '''For some are sane and some are mad And some are good and some are bad And some are better, some are worse — But all may be described in verse.'''
 * You now have learned enough to see
 * The Ad-dressing of Cats

The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)
London: Faber and Faber, 1939
 * When a term has become as universally sanctified as 'democracy' now is, I begin to wonder whether it means anything, in meaning too many things […]. Some persons have gone so far as to affirm, as something self-evident, that democracy is the only regime compatible with Christianity; on the other hand, the word is not abandoned by sympathisers with the government of Germany. If anybody ever attacked democracy, I might discover what the word means. Certainly there is a sense in which Britain and America are more democratic than Germany; but on the other hand, defenders of the totalitarian system can make out a plausible case for maintaining that what we have is not democracy, but financial oligarchy.
 * Ch. I, pp. 14–15


 * That Liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature. For it is something which tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of departure is more real to us than our destination; and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in imagination. By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.
 * Ch. I, pp. 15–16


 * [T]he tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies of men and women—of all classes—detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.
 * Ch. I, p. 21
 * Sometimes misquoted on the internet, with "unlimited industrialism" replaced by "liberals".


 * For the great mass of humanity whose attention is occupied mostly by their direct relation to the soil, or the sea, or the machine, and to a small number of persons, pleasures, and duties,[…] as their capacity for thinking about the objects of faith is small, their Christianity may be almost wholly realised in behaviour: both in their customary and periodic religious observances, and in a traditional code of behaviour towards their neighbours.
 * Ch. II, pp. 28–29


 * In a negative liberal society you have no agreement as to there being any body of knowledge which any educated person should have acquired at any particular stage: the idea of wisdom disappears, and you get sporadic and unrelated experimentation. A nation's system of education is much more important than its system of government; only a proper system of education can unify the active and the contemplative life, action and speculation, politics and the arts. But 'education', said Coleridge, 'is to be reformed, and defined as synonymous with instruction'. This revolution has been effected; to the populace education means instruction. The next step to be taken by the clericalism of secularism, is the inculcation of the political principles approved by the party in power.
 * Ch. II, p. 41
 * The Coleridge quotation, which, as its context shows, is deeply ironic, is from his On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each (London: William Pickering, 1839), Ch. VII. "Regrets and Apprehensions", p. 66


 * The Spirit descends in different ways, and I cannot foresee any future society in which we could classify Christians and non-Christians simply by their professions of belief, or even, by any rigid code, by their behaviour. In the present ubiquity of ignorance, one cannot but suspect that many who call themselves Christians do not understand what the word means, and that some who would vigorously repudiate Christianity are more Christian than many who maintain it.
 * Ch. II, PP. 42–43


 * It is not enthusiasm, but dogma, that differentiates a Christian from a pagan society.
 * Ch. IV, p. 59


 * Any human scheme for society is realised only when the great mass of humanity has become adapted to it; but this adaptation becomes also, insensibly, an adaptation of the scheme itself to the mass on which it operates: the overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution, and what is realised is so unlike the end that enthusiasm conceived, that foresight would weaken the effort.
 * Ch. IV, pp. 59–60


 * We may say that religion, as distinguished from modern paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature. It may be observed that the natural life and the supernatural life have a conformity to each other which neither has with the mechanistic life.
 * Ch. IV, p. 61


 * We are being made aware that the organisation of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destruction, is leading both to the deformation of humanity by unregulated industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural resources, and that a good deal of our material progress is a progress for which succeeding generations may pay dearly. I need only mention, as an instance now very much before the public eye, the results of 'soil-erosion'—the exploitation of the earth, on a vast scale for two generations, for commercial profit: immediate benefits leading to dearth and desert.
 * Ch. IV, p. 61


 * [A] wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God.
 * Ch. IV, p. 62


 * As political philosophy derives its sanction from ethics, and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organisation which will not, to its ultimate destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality. The term 'democracy', as I have said again and again, does not contain enough positive content to stand alone against the forces you dislike—it can easily be transformed by them. If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.
 * Ch. IV, p. 63
 * "I am a jealous God" (Exodus 20:5)


 * [T]he German national religion […] expounded by Professor Wilhelm Hauer […] is deistic, claiming to 'worship a more than human God'. He believes it to be 'an eruption from the biological and spiritual depths of the German nation', and unless one is prepared to deny that the German nation has such depths, I do not see that the statement can be ridiculed. He believes that 'each new age must mold its own religious forms'—alas, many persons in Anglo-Saxon countries hold the same belief. He believes […] also in something very popular in this country, the religion of the blue sky, the grass and flowers.[…] The German National Religion, as Hauer expounds it, turns out to be something with which we are already familiar. So, if the German Religion is also your religion, the sooner you realise the fact the better.
 * Notes, pp. 70–72
 * The quotations are from, as Eliot writes (p. 70), "the essay contributed by Dr. Hauer to a very interesting volume, Germany's New Religion (Allen and Unwin, 1937), in which orthodox Lutheranism is defended by Karl Heim, and Catholicism by Karl Adam".


 * For most people, the actual constitution of society, or that which their more generous passions wish to bring about, is right, and Christianity must be adapted to it. But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative, or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things; liberalism a relaxation of discipline; revolution a denial of the permanent things.
 * Appendix, p. 97

Quotes about Eliot

 * "Order"—that is what makes Mr Eliot's critical work so precious to us today; he has imposed an order on our chaos, our intellectual anarchy; he throws us a plank as we drown in a sea of platitudes and foaming stupidities. His criticism is sane without being dull or imitative; original without eccentricities; profound without obscurity; cultured without affectation; vigorous without being superficial.
 * Richard Aldington, Poetry Vol.17 ed. Harriet Monroe, Modern Poetry Association (1921)


 * In writing his verse plays, Mr. Eliot took, I believe, the only possible line. Except at a few unusual moments, he kept the style Drap.
 * W. H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (1968)


 * 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.
 * Robert Frost, in Lawrance Thompson, 'Notes from Conversations with Robert Frost' (unpublished), in The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, ed. R. Faggen (2001)


 * If time is on a plane of existence great writers sometimes penetrate, doesn't T. S. Eliot wander ahead over Ground Zero when he writes, way back in 1922, 'And I will show you something different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you/or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.'
 * Nadine Gordimer "Fear Eats the Soul" (2003)


 * A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man and he never hit a ball out of the infield in his life.
 * Ernest Hemingway, 1950 letter quoted in Edwin McDowell, "The Literati's Appreciation for Baseball," New York Times (April 8,1981), p. 69.


 * All through the 1980s I'd hear echoes of T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men": "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."
 * Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, "We Are the Only Adults" in The Issue is Power (1992)


 * It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather "nonviolently" in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."
 * The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1998)


 * When I was in high school, I had never read Black poetry. The one poet of color whom I had read, and loved, was Pablo Neruda. I have to say that Neruda and Millay were the two poets I loved. All the others didn't make much sense. Except Eliot. He really got to me. That man really did it for me with language.
 * 1984 interview in Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004)


 * Wylie and Millay were standard in high school-women whom I really loved. Eliot. That man used to put me on fire with his words.
 * 1978 interview in Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004)


 * T. S. Eliot, Millay, Helene Margaret, I read and connected with because they made me feel what they were feeling, or wanted to feel.
 * 1978 interview in Conversations with Audre Lorde (2004)


 * T.S. Eliot says, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
 * Alicia Ostriker Interview (2012)


 * Most of the great critics of English poetry have also been poets: Sir Philip Sidney, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Shelley, T.S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound, to name a few.
 * Alicia Ostriker Interview


 * In my college years T. S. Eliot was the most talked-of poet. The Cocktail Party played on Broadway at that time; his name and work were already part of student conversations, alluded to in courses…Christianity aside, there was for me a repulsive quality to Eliot's poetry: an aversion to ordinary life and people. I couldn't have said that then. I tried for some time to admire the structure, the learnedness, the cadences of the poems, but the voice overall sounded dry and sad to me. Eliot was still alive, and I did not know how much his poetry had been a struggle with self-hatred and breakdown; nor was I particularly aware that his form of Christianity, like the religion I had rejected, was aligned with a reactionary politics. He was supposed to be a master, but, as the young woman I was, seeking possibilities-and responsibilities-of existence in poetry, I felt he was useless for me.
 * Adrienne Rich What Is Found There (2003)


 * Muriel Rukeyser was a breakaway from the irony and fatalism of modernists like Eliot and Auden.
 * Adrienne Rich A Human Eye (2009)


 * With the children, form is unknown. None of the limits are acknowledged; one cannot speak in terms of freedom, T. S. Eliot would say. "There is no freedom in art," he believes; "freedom is only freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation."
 * Muriel Rukeyser The Life of Poetry (1949)


 * Did you know T.S. Eliot's little poem about me, called "Mr. Apollinax"? He seems to have noticed the madness.
 * Bertrand Russell, in a letter to Barry Fox (27 November 1927)


 * I didn't like him a bit. He was a poseur. He was married to this woman who was very pretty. My husband and I were asked to see them, and my husband roamed around the flat and there were endless photographs of T. S. Eliot and bits of his poetry done in embroidery by pious American ladies, and only one picture of his wife, and that was when she was getting married. Henry pointed it out to me and said, "I don't think I like that man."
 * Rebecca West Interview (1981)


 * The Diary of Vaslav Nijinjsky reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents that we have referred to on this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death; notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbors. We possess no other record of the Outsider's problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems.
 * Colin Wilson in The Outsider, p. 115 (1956)