(1888–1965)
U.S.-born English poet, playwright, and literary critic
T. S. Eliot
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Little Gidding in Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1971), 59.
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
“Ash-Wednesday,” in T. S. Eliot: Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991), 86.
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language / And next year’s words await another voice.
“Little Gidding,” in The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Penguin, 2003), xxi.
Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
I’ve been born, and once is enough.
“Fragment of the Agon,” Sweeney Agonistes in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1952), 80–81.