Quotes about eliot Quotes
18 quotes
""Order"—that is what makes Mr Eliot's critical work so precious to us today; he has imposed an order on our chaos, our intellectual anarchy; he throws us a plank as we drown in a sea of platitudes and foaming stupidities. His criticism is sane without being dull or imitative; original without eccentricities; profound without obscurity; cultured without affectation; vigorous without being superficial."
"In writing his verse plays, Mr. Eliot took, I believe, the only possible line. Except at a few unusual moments, he kept the style Drap."
"We are both poets and we both like to play. That's the similarity. The difference is this: I like to play euchre. He likes to play Eucharist."
"A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man and he never hit a ball out of the infield in his life."
"When I was in high school, I had never read Black poetry. The one poet of color whom I had read, and loved, was Pablo Neruda. I have to say that Neruda and Millay were the two poets I loved. All the others didn't make much sense. Except Eliot. He really got to me. That man really did it for me with language."
"T. S. Eliot, Millay, Helene Margaret, I read and connected with because they made me feel what they were feeling, or wanted to feel."
"Did you know T.S. Eliot's little poem about me, called "Mr. Apollinax"? He seems to have noticed the madness."
"The Diary of Vaslav Nijinjsky reaches a limit of sincerity beyond any of the documents that we have referred to on this study. There are other modern works that express the same sense that civilized life is a form of living death; notably the poetry of T. S. Eliot and the novels of Franz Kafka; but there is an element of prophetic denunciation in both, the attitude of healthy men rebuking their sick neighbors. We possess no other record of the Outsider's problems that was written by a man about to be defeated and permanently smashed by those problems."
"Some poets [...] like Eliot, have become so aware of the huge mechanism of the past that their poems read like a scholarly conglomeration of a century’s wisdom, and are difficult to follow unless we have an intimate knowledge of Dante, the Golden Bough, and the weather-reports in Sanskrit."
"What I'm getting at, among other things, is that Eliot is masterly in execution, but above and beyond that is that extra something of singular genius of which I would say: perhaps one improves by reading these books — or, these books have the power to invigorate. I recently re-read Eliot's Felix Holt, The radical. This book has been very well translated into Dutch. I hope you know it — if you don't know it, see if you can't get hold of it somewhere. There are certain ideas about life in it that I find outstanding — profound things said in a plain way — it's a book written with great spirit, and various scenes are described exactly as Frank Holl or someone like him would draw them. It's a similar conception and outlook. There aren't many writers who are as thoroughly sincere and good as Eliot."
"She is magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous... in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her."
"What is remarkable, extraordinary — and the process remains inscrutable and mysterious — is that this quiet, anxious, sedentary, serious, invalidical English lady, without animal spirits, without adventures, without extravagance, assumption, or bravado, should have made us believe that nothing in the world was alien to her; should have produced such rich, deep, masterly pictures of the multifold life of man."
"You see, it was really George Eliot who started it all... It was she who started putting all the action inside."
"Folks will want things intellectually done, so they take refuge in George Eliot. I am very fond of her, but I wish she'd take her specs off, and come down off the public platform."
"Once, when she [Eliot] was asked which real-life person had been the inspiration for Casaubon — a man whose "soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic; it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its own winds and never flying" — she tapped her own breast."
"There's been some change, as is evident by the number of women writers who are read. And education itself has somewhat changed. There's a lot more encouragement, a lot more writing classes. It was the women's movement that gave women in academe a certain strength. If you'd look at the old reading lists, maybe George Eliot, the Bront‘s, Virginia Woolf might be taught. At Stanford, I think it was 1971, they needed somebody [to teach their first-ever course on women's literature], and my name was suggested. Well, I had no credentials. I had never gone to college. And there was quite a to-do about whether or not I had the qualifications. It was supposed to be a small class. I went into this auditorium. It was jammed. There were, I think, four guys, one of whom went out and then came back again and then went out and then came back again. There were over 100 women there, including faculty wives. By and large, none of this had ever been taught at Stanford before."
"If you were in Russia, I would send you Eliot's "Scenes of Clerical Life," but now I only ask you to read it, especially "Janet's Repentance." Fortunate are the people who, like the English, imbibe Christian teachings with their mother's milk, and in such an elevated, purified form, as Evangelical Protestantism. Here is a moral as well as a religious book, but one which I liked very much and which made a powerful impression on me..."
"Eliot revolutionized the Harvard curriculum, transforming a moribund academic system for training clergy into a modern research institution at the forefront of American and international scholarship."