![]() (In a 2014 piece for The New Yorker, Lee Siegel suggests there had been "simmering tension" all along, even in their early correspondence.) 6. ![]() All Eliot wanted to talk about was Marx's 1933 comedy Duck Soup. The main issue, according to a letter Marx wrote his brother: the comedian had hoped he was in for a "Literary Evening," and tried to discuss King Lear. The two men, unfortunately, didn’t hit it off. ![]() After writing back and forth for a few years, they met in real life in 1964, when Eliot hosted Marx and his wife for dinner at his London home. Marx replied, gave Eliot a photo of himself, and started a correspondence with the poet. Eliot had an epistolary friendship with Groucho Marx.Įliot wrote comedian Groucho Marx a fan letter in 1961. Out of the four, the last is his favorite. He considered "Four Quartets,” a set of four poems that explored philosophy and spirituality, to be his best writing. His poems and plays in the 1930s and 1940s-including "Ash Wednesday," "Murder in the Cathedral," and "Four Quartets"-reveal themes of religion, faith, and divinity. In 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism and became a British citizen. Eliot considered "Four Quartets" to be his best work. "It’s much better to stop and think about something else quite different.” 4. “I sometimes found at first that I wanted to go on longer, but when I looked at the stuff the next day, what I’d done after the three hours were up was never satisfactory," he explained. But no matter what method he used, he tried to always keep a three hour writing limit. Eliot’s writing limit.Įliot wrote poems and plays partly on a typewriter and partly with pencil and paper. The result: the massively successful stage production "Cats," which opened in London in 1981 and, after its 1982 NYC debut, became one of the longest-running Broadway shows of all time. ![]() A fan of Eliot's Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats since childhood, in the late '70s, Andrew Lloyd Webber decided to set many of Eliot's poems to music. One doesn’t want to lose one’s skill,” he explained in his Paris Review interview. For Eliot, there was never any tension between those two modes: “One wants to keep one’s hand in, you know, in every type of poem, serious and frivolous and proper and improper. In stark contrast to most of Eliot's other works-which are complex and frequently nihilistic-the poems here were decidedly playful. In 1939, Eliot published a book of poetry, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, which included feline-focused verses he likely wrote for his godson. One of the longest-running Broadway shows ever exists thanks to T.S. “The danger, as a rule, of having nothing else to do is that one might write too much rather than concentrating and perfecting smaller amounts.” 2. “I feel quite sure that if I’d started by having independent means, if I hadn’t had to bother about earning a living and could have given all my time to poetry, it would have had a deadening influence on me,” Eliot said. In a 1959 interview with The Paris Review, Eliot remarked that his banking and publishing jobs actually helped him be a better poet. ![]() He could only write poetry in his spare time, but he preferred it that way. Throughout his life, Eliot supported himself by working as a teacher, banker, and editor. Born September 26, 1888, modernist poet and playwright Thomas Stearns (T.S.) Eliot is best known for writing "The Waste Land." But the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was also a prankster who coined a perennially popular curse word, and created the characters brought to life in the Broadway musical "Cats." In honor of Eliot’s birthday, here are a few things you might not know about the writer. ![]()
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