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TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century
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TIME, Almanac of the 20th Century.ISO
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1930
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30poems
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<text>
<title>
(1930s) T.S. Eliot--Collected Poems
</title>
<history>
TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1930s Highlights
Books
</history>
<article>
<source>Time Magazine</source>
<hdr>
T.S. Eliot: Collected Poems
</hdr>
<body>
<p>(May 25, 1936)
</p>
<p> Thomas Stearn Eliot is a St. Louis boy who went to Harvard,
and beyond. Not a particularly shining light in an undergraduate
world that included such firebrands and footlights as the late
John Reed and Walter Lippmann, he polished his post-graduate
lamp to such purpose that he became Poet Laureat of the Lost
Generation. His famed Waste Land has stood like a lighthouse
against the whole flocks of sophisticated blues-writers have
dashed themselves in vain emulation. When Poet Eliot expatriated
himself to England, there were few disapproving murmurs from his
followers. But when he publicly renounced agnosticism, announced
himself a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and
Anglo-Catholic in religion." he started an indignant fluttering
in literary incubators that has not yet died down. Poet Eliot,
now a naturalized British subject, a scholarly editor (The
Criterion), even more highly regarded in his foster-country than
in the U.S., a devout member of the Church of England, is a
puzzling phenomenon. Last week he published his Collected Poems.
</p>
<p> Critics and admirers may respect Eliot's later, purportedly
religious poems, such as Ash Wednesday, but will stick with them
will be gobbets of his earlier verse, such as the closing lines
of The Hollow Men:
</p>
<qt>
<l>This is the way the world ends</l>
<l>This is the way the world ends</l>
<l>This is the way the world ends</l>
<l>Not with a bang but a whimper.</l>
</qt>
</body>
</article>
</text>