Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

Portrait of a Lady

Inside my brain a dull tom-tom begins / Absurdly hammering a prelude of its own / capricious monotone”

La Figlia Che Piange

As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised, / As the mind deserts the body it has used

Gerontion The word

The word within a word unable to speak a word / Swaddled with darkness

Gerontion history

Think now / History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors, deceives with whispering ambitions

The Hippopotamus

While the true Church can never fail / For it is based upon a rock

TWL The Burial of the Dead

Mme Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, / Had a bad cold, nevertheless / Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe / With a Wicked pack of cards

TWL A Game of Chess Speak

Speak to me. Why do you never speak. / What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? / I never know what you are thinking. Think.

TWL The Fire Sermon

Burning burning burning burning / O Lord Thou pluckest me out / O Lord Thou pluckest me / burning

The Hollow Men I Those who have crossed

Those who have crossed / With direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom / Remember us - if at all - not as lost / Violent soul, but only / As the hollow men / The stuffed men

The Hollow Men II There is a tree

There is a tree swinging / And voices are / In the wind singing / More distant and more solemn / Than a fading star

Ash-Wednesday I Because I know

Because I know that time is always time / And place is always and only place / And what is actual is actual only for one time / And only for one place

Ash-Wednesday II There is no

There is no life in them. As I am forgotten / And would be forgotten, so I would forget

Ash-Wednesday II End of the

End of the endless / Journey to no end / Conclusion of all that / Is inconclusible / Speech without word and / Word of no speech

Ash-Wednesday III Struggling

Struggling with the devil of the stair who wears / The deceitful face of hope and despair

Ash-Wednesday IV One who moves

One who moves in the time between sleep and waking

Ash-Wednesday V If the lost word

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent, / 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

Journey of the Maggi

With the voices singing in our ears, saying / That this was all folly

A Song for Simeon

Now at this birth season of decease, / Let the infant, the unspeaking and unspoken Word / Grant Israel’s consolation

Animula Shadow

Shadow of its own shadow, spectre in its own gloom

Reflections on Vers Libre, T.S. Eliot, 1917

The ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the “freest” verse

Lacey Rumsey

strong rhythmicity

Tradition and Individual Talent, T.S. Eliot 1919

the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past

J. Hopkins

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

T.S. Eliot, Letter to J.H. Woods, January 1915

my fatal disposition towards scepticism

T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933

The ideal medium for poetry, to my mind, and the most direct means of social ‘usefulness’ for poetry, is the theatre

T.S. Eliot, Thoughts After Lambeth, 1931

The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail

André Salmon, 1912

Un bordel philosophique 

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

Things are always different than what they might be. If you wait for them to change, you will never do anything

Stephen Dedalus, James Joyce, Ulysses

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake

The Hollow Men IV Sightless

Sightless unless / The eyes reappear / As the perpetual star / Multifoliate rose / Of death’s other kingdom / The hope only / Of empty men