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Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter
dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so
many,
I had not thought death had undone
so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were
exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before
his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King
William Street, [Eliots poetry is] a music of ideas. The
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept ideas are of all kind, abstract and
the hours concrete, general and particular, and,
With a dead sound on the final stroke like the musicians phrases, they are
arranged, not that they may tell us
of nine.
something, but that their effects in us
There I saw one I knew, and stopped may combine into a coherent whole of
him, crying: Stetson! feeling and attitude and produce a
You who were with me in the ships at peculiar liberation of the will. They are
Mylae! there to be responded to, not to be
That corpse you planted last year in pondered or worked out.
your garden,
Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom - I. A. Richards, The Poetry of T. S.
this year? Eliot
Or has the sudden frost disturbed its Thomas Stearns Eliot was one
bed?
of the most influential figures in the
Oh keep the Dog far hence, thats
friend to men, English culture of the twentieth
Or with his nails hell dig it up again! century. He was born in St. Louis
You! hypocrite lecteur!mon (Missouri) in 1888, the last child of
semblable,mon frre! an American bourgeois family
rooted to New England
traditionalism. He studied
T. S. Eliot Philosophy and English Literature at
Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford
from 1906 to 1916. In 1915, he
published The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock, with the support of
Ezra Pound, who became one of the
most important promoters of Eliots
work during his early years as a
poet. Pound was a decisive
influence in the creation of The It is considered as one of the
Waste Land (1922), Eliots most most important poems of the 20th
important and influential work. He century and a central work of
converted to Anglicanism and modernist poetry. Eliot's poem
renounced to his American follows the legend of the Holy Grail
citizenship in 1927 to adopt the and the Fisher King combined with
English one. Later, he declared vignettes of contemporary British
himself: classicist in literature, society. Eliot employs many literary
royalist in politics, and Anglo- and cultural allusions from the
Catholic in religion.Subsequent Western canon, Buddhism and the
works like The Hollow Men, Ash Hindu Upanishads. The poem shifts
Wednesday, and Four Quartets between voices of satire and
consolidate his career as poet. Eliot prophecy featuring abrupt and
also became one of the leading unannounced changes of speaker,
critics of the New Criticism creed. location, and time and conjuring of a
He won the Nobel Prize of Literature vast and dissonant range of cultures
in 1948. Eliot died in January, 1965. and literatures.