VIOLENT contrasts racked his life and art. His poems could be golden and struck by grace, split by the metaphysical hammer of God; but his most golden lines were yoked to an ironic, satanic vision of ...

Peter Gizzi, professor of poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, recently won the 2024 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, one of the world’s most prestigious poetry awards. Gizzi’s book “Fierce ...

If fame is the name of your desire, writing about literature is among the least likely ways to find it. From the 17th century until today, only four literary critics, John Dryden (1631-1700), Samuel ...

“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” ...

In 1927, at 38 years of age, the expatriated American poet T.S. Eliot was baptised and confirmed in the Anglo-Catholic tradition. The celebrated author of The Waste Land (1922) – that literary paragon ...

When I was in middle school, my eighth grade English teacher Mr. Ortman read a poem aloud to the class called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot. At the time, I was just discovering ...

It is one of the grimmest monuments of suffering and despair ever penned. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” might also be one of the most difficult texts to interpret. But whatever the author was doing ...

In the autumn of 1914, Harriet Monroe prepared a manuscript for the typesetters of Poetry, a magazine she edited in what had been the front room of a mansion at 543 N. Cass St. in Chicago. Since then, ...

Until 1949, when Eliot met Valerie Fletcher, the secretary to whom he would be happily married from 1957 until his death in 1965, love went badly for the Nobel poet. He regarded his miserable 18-year ...

In college one night, I got very stoned and read T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” I was gripped by it, and felt I understood it — a feat I’ve never come close to accomplishing since. Yet I don’t think I ...