REFLECTIONS: Mr. Eliot

(See Cover)

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

With his features of clerical cut.

And his brow so grim

And his mouth so prim

And his conversation, so nicely

Restricted to What Precisely

And If and Perhaps and But . . .

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

(Whether his mouth be open or shut.)

­T. S. Eliot

Few Americans have had the dubious pleasure of meeting Thomas Stearns Eliot. To most of them, he is an expatriate, obscurely highbrow poet who wrote an unreadable poem called The Waste Land and fathered a catch-phrase about the world...