Normal people have celebrity crushes, but I go for the truly unobtainable: dead poets. Anyone who knows anything about me knows that my love for Thomas Stearns Eliot should be its own category of a mental disorder. I’m essentially his third wife.
Maybe you’re also interested in obsessing over a literary inspiration… well paws off, because Eliot is mine, you skank.
Obsessing over a writer is surprisingly fulfilling. From my own personal experience, most literary work I read, I read in singularity. I won’t often search out a poet or writer to discover more of their works, or read up on their bios – it’s a rather New Criticism approach. Yet, learning more about the creator makes their work more wholesome, allowing you as a reader to get more into their head and more into their writing.
I was first introduced to the drug that is T. S. Eliot by a long-term substitute high school English teacher. She read aloud The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock with such passion and soul that I was smitten. To this day, it is my favorite poem. It is the poem that made me realize I was a poet.
Throughout the years, I’ve pined over Eliot and his work. Never mind that he’s been dead now for fifty one years. Prufrock was published in 1915 when Eliot was twenty seven years old, and his writing is a staple of the Modernist movement – the literary period that commanded the uncertainty of desolation from The Great War through embracing unrestrained poetic forms.
T. S. Eliot has made me one of those basic girls who have an answer to “If you could live during a different time period, when would you live?” I would only endure the 1920s under the condition of becoming Eliot’s best friend. To hell with those World Wars and excessive material wealth and women’s emerging civil rights. I would be at mercy to learning about Eliot’s writing process, engaging in literary conversations with his peers through our own poetry, and following that man across an ocean to London while hopefully acquiring a fancy accent as a bonus prize.
To prevent myself from going on indefinitely, here are lists of fun facts about Thomas Stearns Eliot, as well as some of his literary works for your consumption:
Works:
The Waste Land (epic poem)
The Hollow Men (poem)
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (a children’s book that was the basis for the musical Cats)
Murder in the Cathedral (play)
The Cocktail Party (play)
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| That Eliot is so hot right now. (source) |
Fun Facts:
- Eliot was born in Saint Louis, MO on September 26, 1888. My brother lives there and tells me that there is a bar on the street that Eliot grew up that named a drink after him. I’ve yet to have this drink…
- Eliot went to Harvard and was in a fraternity!?
- College-age Eliot was a good-looking man and you cannot tell me otherwise.
- Eliot was almost twenty three when he finished writing The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. How old are you? What have you been doing with your life?
- He and Ezra Pound were the cutest of best friends. Pound helped Eliot make sense of the muck pile that was The Waste Land by acting as his editor. Eliot was crazy depressed at this time because the poor baby was a banker because everyone knows that artists don’t get employed so Pound went around trying to collect money from friends so that Eliot could take a paid vacation to recover his mental health & finish The Waste Land.
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