We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

~ T. S. Eliot

Little Gidding

April Is The Cruellest Month - T. S. Eliot reads from his poem The Waste Land

A Handful Of Dust - T. S. Eliot reads from his poem The Waste Land

A Handful Of Dust - From The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot - Read by Eileen Atkins

There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

DA Poets

Honestly, any poetry is DA poetry if you can recite it from memory or sound intelligent while speaking of it.

• T. S. Elliot 

          Didn’t write much poetry, but what he did write is dense with meaning

• Wisława Szymborska

          Any of her poems are instant winners, for a great collection I would recommend Map: Collected and Last Poems

• William Shakespeare

          Classic, cannot go wrong with any of his works

• Anne Sexton

          For bonus points, listen to the song “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel based on the poem “45 Mercy Street”

• John Milton

          Paradise Lost is always recognizable by name

• Homer

          Both The IliadandThe Odyssey are the best known works, bonus points if you are able to read them in their original Greek for the full effect

• Edgar Allen Poe

          Although The Raven is his most notable work of poetry, his short stories are also enjoyable

• Robert Frost

          An acquired taste compared to my other favourite poets, but my top four are definitely “The Road Not Taken”, “Mending Wall”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, and “Acquainted With the Night”

• Mark Twain

          Recognizable in name and work

• Lord Byron

          An older poet, much of his language is obsolete in the modern era yet conveys meanings we could not hope to comprehend without it

• Sappho

          An excellent romantic, “Slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl” Bonus points if you read it in the original Greek for the full effect

• Walt Whitman

          The modern-day version of a classical poet: free verse is his specialty!  

• Edgar Allan Poe

          The O.G. dark academic, the literature teacher’s favourite Halloween lesson.  Nothing can beat the simple and unsettling Poetry of Poe!

• Oscar Wilde

          Nothing will ever be as iconic as The Picture of Dorian Gray has become in the DA aesthetic! a definite must-read.

“The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.”

-T.S. Eliot

cushfuddled:

cushfuddled:

I find it really frustrating sometimes that you can speculate about a long-dead person’s sexuality like, “Maybe they were gay” or “Maybe they were bi” and people will be like “Huh yeah I guess they could’ve been” but the second you say “Maybe they were ace” they’re like

hoW D A R EYOU

HE JUST!!!! HAD HIGH STANDARDS!!!!!! 

This New Yorker article calls T.S. Eliot’s sex life “a sad and desolate place.” The author declares, “Eliot was…almost certainly a frustrated virgin” when he married his first wife (who he proceeded to sleep a room away from, by the way). The same article explains that Eliot was “in love with” his next partner…and never had sex with her. He was also never sexual with his THIRD partner. The article concludes that T.S. Elliot was SURELY not sex-averse (GOOD HEAVENS NO!) but rather wrote sex as bad because “For Eliot, bad sex was the symptom of a failure of civilization, and it is a fallacy to conclude that, because sex in his poems is disgusting, Eliot was disgusted by sex.”

That’s genuinely how people talk about T.S. Eliot. We all make fun of articles that say things like, “This female author divorced her husband and lived with her CLOSE FEMALE FRIEND for the rest of her life.” But for some reason when I say, “As a sex-repulsed asexual person I relate to a lot of T.S. Eliot’s poetry because so many of his works are caught between an almost hopeless desire for affection and a terrified disgust for sex,“ that’s considered UNINTELLECTUAL. Obviously I’m grossly misinterpreting the TRUE BRILLIANCE of T.S. Eliot’s poetry. When I look up T.S. Eliot’s love life and say, “Maybe T.S. Eliot was like me,” that’s shoved away with “NO! HE COULDN’T POSSIBLY BE LIKE YOU! HE WAS JUST P I C K Y!!!” 

Just…would people PLEASE stop rushing to dead people’s “defense” just because I “accused” them of DARING to POSSIBLY be asexual????

As@adventuresofalgy  reminds me in a comment on my last post, poets sometimes deliberately use words that don’t seem to make much sense, producing the same effect as the wonky lyrics I quoted there. Consider this, from TS Eliot’s Burnt Norton

Garlic and sapphires in the mud

Clot the bedded axle tree.

Aye, right.

And here’s what Eliot had to say on the subject himself (actually talking about a Mallarmé sonnet that inspired the line):

It is a mistake to suppose that a simile or a metaphor is always something meant to be visible to the imagination; and even when it is meant to be visible, that all its parts are meant to be visible at once.

[…]

Poetry is incantation, as well as imagery.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

[…]

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts

~T. S. Eliot