Word: poeticize
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...life; yet in life he was the model Christian gentleman, kind and good-and in his last years supremely happy. At his death in London last week of pulmonary emphysema, it was clear that Thomas Stearns Eliot, 76, was one of the few major poets of a minor poetic age, and far and away the most influential man of letters of his half of the century...
...published poems of Eliot's long lifetime's work hardly fill 200 pages. He also wrote five major verse plays of varying quality and several volumes of criticism. His strongest admirers recognize that his poetic subject matter and emotional range were limited. But no poet has ever been more fortunate in his time and place: Eliot was uncannily attuned to the moment after World War I when an entire generation was haunted by spiritual despair...
...Enchanted Forest. For that generation, Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was a shock-the bitter, bracing shock of recognition. Prufrock was simply the first modern poem. It abandoned romantic oratory for conversational speech, threw away stately "poetic" meters for the subtle syncopated rhythms of the jazz age, brought poetry out of the misty enchanted forest into the gritty reality of the modern city...
...poetic public was taken aback by Ash-Wednesday, his first published poem in five years. Subdued and introspective, it was also religious to the point of being liturgical...
Eliot thus became the only major poet of this century who was intensely and essentially Christian. The development of this poetic theme which seemed so sudden at the time, was accompanied by a more gradual shift in style and manner. Thus, by the time he wrote the Four Quartets, his last major poems, Eliot's style was often densely compact, unitary, monolithic even: much more self-contained except for the recurring Christian symbology. However elevated, the later poems are neither so revolutionary nor so widely pertinent. Naturally enough: the saved man speaks to a resentful audience, the tortured...