He changed the way poetry in English is written he re-set the paradigm for literary criticism and his work laid down the principles on which the modern English department is built. Yet he was a true avant-gardist, and he made a revolution. His place in the curriculum is established, but he is hardly popular as a subject of teaching or scholarship. During his most productive years as a writer, from 1917 to 1925, he worked in a bank. He was dismissive of grand theories of poetry, or anything else, and he never held a regular academic appointment. The project to which he committed most of the latter part of his career, the revival of verse drama, was a failure. The poems and plays that Eliot published in his lifetime fill a single volume his prose works are collections of talks and occasional journalism. He claimed to consider Richard III, who died in 1485, the last legitimate English king. He came to hold political and religious views that were far to the right of most of his contemporaries’, and to believe that Western civilization had been in decline since the thirteenth century, the time of Dante. He was known to friends as a connoisseur of cheese-there are several anecdotes about him in which the punch line is provided by a remark about cheese-and as a collector of umbrellas with custom handles. His manner was so correct that it sometimes seemed a few degrees too correct. Eliot was a morally, intellectually, and sartorially fastidious man.

“In ‘The Waste Land,’ I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying,” Eliot told an interviewer.

Free fall by joyce sweeney