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Willie Nelson | |
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 Veteran country music singer Willie Nelson is always up to something new. Read our Willie Watch column to keep up.
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Poem of the Month |
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Poem for April 2007
• from The Waste Land 1922 by T.S. Eliot (1988-1965)
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Sunday,
1 April, 2007
"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."
T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) from The Waste Land 1922
These are the opening lines of The Waste Land by the American born poet T.S. Eliot. Written in 1922, it is widely regarded as Eliot's finest work and one of the most influential poems of the 20th century. It has been described as "a landmark meditation on human unease with the modern world."
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford.
He settled in England in 1914, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk. Eventually he became Liiterary Editor for the publishers Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church. In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Other works included Four Quartets,The Love Song of Alfred J Prufock, Murder in the Cathedral and, in more whimsical vein, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats which adapted by composer Andrew Lloyd Weber as the hit musical Cats in the 1970s.
His first wife Vivien Haigh-Wood, a English ballet dancer dancer who he married in 1915, suffered a series of mental and emotional problems and the strain of caring for his wife and earning a living brought Eliot himself close to collapse on more than one occasion and in 1921 he had a breakdown. Although he separated from his wife, who was committed to a mental institution in the 1930s, his religious beliefs meant he refused to divorce her. The emotional turmoilof caring for her may also have fuelled his poetry. Virginia Woolf once said: "He was one of those poets who live by scratching, and his wife was his itch."
Some years after Vivien's death (in 1947) he married his secretary Valerie Fletcher in 1957. Valerie was appointed his literary executor and has fiercely protected his memory ever since on behalf of the estate.
He died in 1965 and his ashes are buried, at his request, in the grounds of St. Michael's, East Coker in Somerset, England. A plaque on the church wall bears his chosen epitaph--lines from Four Quartets: "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning."
On The Lam 2007
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