Eliot Dies: Modern Poetry Loses Its Architect
He said: "April is the cruellest month." T. S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1922 while recovering from a nervous breakdown, partly in a sanatorium in Switzerland. It's 434 lines, full of quotations from five languages, and it changed English poetry. He was American and became British, a banker who became a publisher, a skeptic who became a committed Anglican. He was married twice — the first marriage was a disaster publicly documented in both their writings. He won the Nobel Prize in 1948. He died at 76, apparently content, finally.
January 4, 1965
61 years ago
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