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“... desires, and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches. T.S. Eliot to Conrad Aiken, 31 December 1914 Writing a London Letter for the Dial in September 1922, T.S. Eliot suggested that there were ‘at present . . . three main types of English novel’. There was the ‘old narrative ...”

“... still beckoned aspiring American poets. Ezra Pound arrived in 1908, Robert Frost in 1912, and T.S. Eliot in 1914. When Pound arrived he was only 23, Eliot was 26, but Frost was almost 39. He had been writing poetry, most of it unpublished, for some twenty years, and the difference in style was striking. Set beside the early ...”

“... may be too subjective a sense, to span the period from the birth of Whitman to the death of T.S. Eliot. It could be said that before Whitman, no American poet of real gifts wrote American literature; and after Eliot, none wrote anything else. Between these two points, two cultures, already to different degrees and in ...”

“... Lyndall Gordon suggests that later in life, visited by moods in which evil seemed everywhere, T.S. Eliot sometimes suspected the man he too had once thought holy was in fact diabolic. Reading Williams, you can sometimes see what Eliot meant. Williams seems to believe in the magic he so frequently describes; you suspect that ...”

“... anything in the wide field in which he has interested himself. We even find him advising T.S. Eliot to refuse ‘that ridiculous award’, the Companion of Literature, offered by that ‘miserable institution’ the Royal Society of Literature. He was a member of the General Advisory Council of the BBC as well as a spirit it would surely be right to call ...”

“... acknowledgment of the scattered incompleteness of experience constituted, for him, an important test of a writer’s humility before the sheer solidity of the empirical.This anthologising impulse made for a distinctive reviewing style. He could, when he chose, be conscientious enough about giving a report on a book’s contents, but increasingly he just ...”

“... coast of Kent is dotted with these historical connections to 20th-century experimentalists. T.S. Eliot recovering at Margate is the best known. (As at least one local wag has spotted, there is no tribute to Eliot attached to the seafront shelter where he composed The Waste Land, but it is close by the anagrammatic ...”

“... poetry like that.’ Using Biography is devoted to six authors: Marvell, Dryden, Fielding, Yeats, Eliot and Joyce. The central essays had been printed before, but are here revised and supplemented. Three related principles unify the book, all argued for and all good-naturedly shocked at the pretty pass to which things have come. First, that the knowledge of ...”

“... a prefatory note to this book about three late 20th-century poets and what they owe to Pound and Eliot, ‘it doesn’t seem to me that my arguments and appreciations, as appreciative argument, derive from or depend upon personal friendship or personal feelings. I have published for more than 40 years my gratitude for Hill’s art and for Lowell’s, and for ...”

“... treatment wouldn’t have worked in poetry, though, if it hadn’t been able to pass the Nigella Test – you need somebody foxy and energetic to head up the whole operation, or it’s dead before it starts. Thankfully, there’s Daisy Goodwin, who has lovely dark hair and perfect teeth: just the person to encourage the use of poetry as a kind of mental ...”

“... wife of the actor Miles Malleson, wrote a novel à clef in which a character based on T.S. Eliot called Russell ‘a man exhausting other men by his intellect; exhausting women by his intensity; wearing out his friends, sucking them dry, passing from person to person, never giving any real happiness – or finding any.’ It is clear from his ...”

“... campaign with the dumbest, shortest poem the committee can find, set in 50-point bold’. His T.S. Eliot Lecture that year widened the definition to include chicken-soup anthologisers, Harold Pinter’s righteously angry protest verse, and any poetic therapist who mistakes ‘the jargon of self-help’ for the tough process of writing. By trying to make poetry ...”

“... as Gustav Sack and Hans Leybold, received from the conflict its decisive authority. If T.S. Eliot had succeeded in joining the American Navy in 1917 and been sunk in action, the most important poem to come out of the war would not have been written. Trakl, who trained as a pharmacist before the war in order to have unlimited access to drugs, died of a ...”

“... as progressively enlightened.’) In the Leavisite manner, he talks as if the best writing were a test of the reader, but unlike Leavis he loves the energy of talk. These lectures are most enjoyable for their unashamed, occasionally shameless, exploitation of colloquial affects. They are rich in clichés and idioms, gleefully twisted or misapplied. Giving ...”

“... the school I went to from 1946 until 1952, as a grammar school though I suppose it was. It wasn’t so self-conscious and pleased with itself as most of the schools that feature and the range of ability for which it catered seems in retrospect so wide it might well have been a comprehensive school before its time. Nor was it in the least bit snobbish as so ...”