The first quatrain is chillingly macabre.ġ0. He wrote numerous essays on Shakespeare’s contemporaries, but also a fine poem, ‘Whispers of Immortality’ (1919), which is one of Eliot’s few truly metaphysical poems (it even mentions, after Webster, the metaphysical poet John Donne). ‘Webster was much possessed by death’.Įliot learned much from the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and spent the last few decades of his life trying to create a modern living verse drama in English.
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Eliot made this pronouncement in an essay on the playwright Philip Massinger, and it has since become one of his most famous statements about the way poets get ‘inspiration’ for their work.Įliot’s point is that more experienced poets know how to ‘steal’ ideas from other poets but then transform them in the taking in this regard, his comment shares much with his theory about poetic originality from another essay, ‘ Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in which he argued that a good modern poet uses previous poets’ work as a tool for asserting his own modernity and originality.ĩ. Eliot’s prose (as opposed to his poetry) which we include here.
‘ Immature poets imitate mature poets steal’. The unexpectedness of ‘coffee spoons’ as a measuring unit (as opposed to the more usual teaspoons) is perhaps one reason for the popularity of the line, along with its enigmatic quality: is Prufrock saying that his life is nothing more than a charade of tea dances and social engagements, fundamentally futile and lacking in deeper meaning or purpose? Or is this to overanalyse the line?Ĩ. Alfred Prufrock’ (which he’d actually written in 1910 while still in his early twenties). Eliot line found adorning many a novelty coffee mug, this line comes from Eliot’s 1915 poem ‘The Love Song of J. ‘I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’.Ī famous T. This line hints at the idea of death which pervades the poem, especially as it immediately follows some sinister lines about our ‘shadow’ rising to meet us.Īnd this in a section of the poem whose title, ‘The Burial of the Dead’, summons the famous words of the Anglican burial service: ashes to ashes, dust to dust …ħ.
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This is another famous line from Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem full of memorable lines (both Eliot’s and other people’s, which his poem quotes from). ‘ I will show you fear in a handful of dust’. This line strikes at the heart of a widely known truth, expressing it in direct and memorable language.Ħ. ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’.Īnother line from Eliot’s Four Quartets, though this time from the first of the four poems, ‘Burnt Norton’, written in the mid-1930s before Eliot conceived of the idea of writing a suite of four related poems on the theme of time and place. This line, which is curiously apt given Eliot’s own return to his ancestral home, is inscribed on the plaque in the church.
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