“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad
poets deface what they take, and good poets make into something better, or at
least something different.”—American-born British poet-critic-dramatist T. S.
Eliot (1888-1965), “Philip Massinger,” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920)
T.S.Eliot was born 130 years ago today in St. Louis. It is
hard to think of Missouri giving to the world of literature two figures so
different as Mark Twain—folksy, rollicking, and irreverent—and Eliot—deeply
reserved and, after his conversion to the Anglican Church, equally religious.
They may have been mostly sharply differentiated by
their influences. Twain’s were orally based—folk and tall tales of the American
heartland and West by the likes of Josh Billings, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V.
Nasby. (Even a British poet that Twain deeply admired, Robert Browning, was
notable for first-person narrative poems, often filled with pitch-black ironic
humor.)
Eliot’s influences were, perhaps, the entire Western
canon—starting with Virgil and Dante, but hardly stopping there.
Perhaps Eliot’s most important poem, “The Waste
Land” was indisputably his most allusive. It’s the final poem I ever came
across with footnotes by the author himself (reportedly at the insistence of
his publisher, who feared it would be otherwise incomprehensible to readers).
Collectively, these references form a kind of intellectual Baedeker map to the
thoughts of this modernist poet—and, eventual Nobel Literature laureate.
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