Happy Birthday T. S. Eliot

[ggould]

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
  --Four Quartets

[Tinka Cat]

T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. "I'd assign it a
name: gant gnat  dirt upset on drab pot toilet."

[ggould]

comes up again on Writer's Almanac for my fave poet:

It's the birthday  of T.S. Eliot, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1888). His poem 'The Love  Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' is one of the most anthologized poems in the  English language. It begins:
  Let us go then,  you and I,
    When the evening is spread  out against the sky
    Like a patient etherized upon a table;
    Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
    The muttering retreats
    Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
    And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
 
  Eliot wrote most  of the poem when he was only 22 years old. While it was a work in progress, he  subtitled the poem 'Prufrock among the women.' The part 'The  Love Song of' came from a Rudyard Kipling poem, 'The Love Song of Har  Dyal.' At the time, T.S. Eliot went by 'T. Sterns Eliot.' a  formulation that he emulated in the title 'J. Alfred Prufrock.' When  he was growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, there was a furniture store there  named 'Prufrock-Littau Company' -- but decades after the poem was  published, Eliot wrote to a friend: 'I did not have, at the time of  writing the poem, and have not yet recovered, any recollection of having  acquired this name in any way, but I think that it must be assumed that I did,  and that the memory has been obliterated.'
  The poem was  published a few years after it was written, with the encouragement of Ezra  Pound, who was serving as Poetry magazine's overseas editor. He wrote in  1915 to Harriet Monroe about T.S. Eliot: 'He has actually trained himself  AND modernized himself ON HIS OWN. The rest of the promising young have done  one or the other, but never both.' Aside from stuff that had appeared in  school newspapers and magazines, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred  Prufrock' was T.S. Eliot's first published poem. In 1917, it appeared in  book form, the first of 12 Eliot poems in Prufrock and Other Observations.
  Other famous  poems by T.S. Eliot include 'The Wasteland,' which begins 'April  is the cruellest month' -- and 'The Hollow Men,' which concludes:
  This is the way  the world ends
      This is the way the world ends
      This is the way the world ends
      Not with a bang but a whimper

[Gazoo]

T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. "I'd assign it a
name: gant dirt upset on drab pot toilet."

That's the longest anagram I've ever read.  NTM.

[mshray]

It's the birthday  of T.S. Eliot, born in St. Louis, Missouri (1888).

He must have been a Cardinals Fan!!!  At least his parents must have been, so he probably was until he moved to the UK at the age of 26, and maybe longer.  Most ex-pat St.Louisans retain their baseball affiliation until their deathbeads, case in point myself & my brother (despite his gaining a brother-in-law some years ago that works for the Padres & can get him field seat any time he asks).  Anyway, I did some checking on Wiki.  In the year of his birth the franchise, then called the Brown Stockings, won their 4th straight American Association championship.

Spoiler alert: diverging into baseball history for a bit...continued on the Sports Thread

[ggould]

T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. "I'd assign it a
name: gant dirt upset on drab pot toilet."

That's the longest anagram I've ever read.  NTM.

Isn't it a Palindrome?  If so, shouldn't it be "gnat dirt?"

[Gazoo]

T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. "I'd assign it a
name: gant dirt upset on drab pot toilet."

That's the longest anagram I've ever read.  NTM.

Isn't it a Palindrome?  If so, shouldn't it be "gnat dirt?"

You're right, of course.  I don't know why I summoned the wrong word.

[Tinka Cat]

T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. "I'd assign it a
name: gant dirt upset on drab pot toilet."

That's the longest anagram I've ever read.  NTM.

Isn't it a Palindrome?  If so, shouldn't it be "gnat dirt?"

You're right, of course.  I don't know why I summoned the wrong word.

Sit on a potato pan, Otis!

thanks for catching that error - - whichever website I copied it from is prob wrong, too!

[ggould]

It's the birthday of the poet T.S. Eliot, born Thomas Stearns Eliot in St. Louis (1888).
  It was this young Eliot, traveling around Europe as a  college student, who wrote a poem about a middle-aged man, full of poignant  lines about growing older, with the line, 'I grow old ... I grow old ... / I  shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.' That poem was 'The  Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' published in Poetry magazine when Eliot was 26.