About this episode

This episode explores T.S. Eliot's life, his contributions to Modernism, and his notable works.

T.S. Eliot was a mid-west American living in London in the first decades of the 20th century, who wrote Dickens-inflected poems about fog, wind, damp evenings and the general gloom of English life (if you were a young, neurotic, over-educated, American male, that is).  Eliot’s remembered in the same breath as Ezra Pound as a founding father of literary Modernism, but while very few people could quote a line from Pound, almost everyone will recognize some of these evergreen phrases from Eliot’s lugubrious output. “April is the cruellest month,” “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons,” “do I dare eat a peach?”; “I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” and “this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” But thing about Eliot is that he had an ear for a crowd-pleasing line, which is why he also ended up being one of the most important editors of the 20th century at the publishing house Faber and Faber, making the careers of many poets including WH Auden and Marianne Moore. Today you’ll be hearing about Eliot’s penchant for amateur theatricals, Paris, and the philosophy of Henri Bergson; and his pivot from being a…

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