Word: poet
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...reviewed Eliot's latest play. The Elder Statesman (TIME, Sept. 8). Cruel April's bard and the elder statesman of Anglo-American letters is 70 this week, and to the surprise of practically everybody, including himself, Thomas Stearns Eliot seems in love with love and life. The poet who was old at 23, when he wrote Prufrock, is getting young in his old age. Last year the erstwhile "aged eagle" talked about taking dancing lessons, and now he can be seen dining out and piloting his 31-year-old wife Valerie across dance floors. "His brow so grim...
...Last, Maturity. Though Eliot is probably the wealthiest poet alive (The Cocktail Party netted the lyrical sum of $1,000,000), he still reports for his thrice-weekly chores as a partner of the publishing house of Faber & Faber, where he is renowned as the firm's best jacket-blurb writer. There, last week, in his picture-lined office, he made a remarkable confession: "I'm just beginning to grow up, to get maturity. In the last few years. everything I'd done up to 60 or so has seemed very childish." Reminded of a youthfully immature...
...ages of 14 and 18. most of whom sound so solemn and professional as to suggest that England is raising a generation of literary critics. But there are also many signs that Eliot can still stir the young. A 15-year-old girl named Penelope Hodges pays the poet a compliment that may please Old Possum more than all his other honors. Writes Penelope: "T.S. Eliot's poetry affects me keenly, and in a completely different manner from anything I have ever known, because it is literally honest...
Most of today's young poets lead three-baby, two-martini lives at the universities where they serve as assistant professors. The snowy-souled coeds they shepherd through seminars must be highly skeptical about French Poet Arthur Rimbaud's formula for creative success: "Systematic derangement of the senses," sometimes through ordinary alcohol, more often with absinthe, sexual inversion and hashish...
Rimbaud was indisputably the damnedest of the damned, but his biographies cloud into vagueness just as they become most fascinating. At 19, after four years of systematic "derangement" and blazing creation, Rimbaud wrote his bitter valedictory, A Season in Hell, then abandoned poetry-and his homosexual menage with Poet Paul Verlaine. During the next 18 years, until his death in 1891, he left only traces of wanderings that took him to Stuttgart as a teacher, to Java with the Dutch army, to Abyssinia as a trader, gunrunner and, probably, slaver. Now James Ramsey Ullman (The White Tower) has come down...