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He is haunted by a demon, a demon against which he feels powerless, because in its first manifestation it has no face, no name, nothing and the words, the poem he makes, are a kind of exorcism of this demon.

T. S. Eliot

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T. S. Eliot
Age: 76 †
Born: 1888
Born: September 26
Died: 1965
Died: January 4
Critic
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Lyricist
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Poet
Screenwriter
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St. Louis
Missouri
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Eliot
T S Eliot
Thomas Eliot
T.S. Eliot
Nothing
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Demon

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I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.
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Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow
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That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.
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When the Stranger says: What is the meaning of this city? Do you huddle close together because you love each other? What will you answer? We all dwell together To make money from each other? or This is a community? Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger. Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.
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When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all, and cannot be achieved again.
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You gave me hyacinths first a year ago They called me the hyacinth girl.' —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Od' und leer das Meer.
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Human kind cannot bear much reality.
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Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable.
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The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. The houses are all gone under the sea. The dancers are all gone under the hill.
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There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
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The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
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Do I dare disturb the universe?
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So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
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We fight to keep something alive rather than in the expectation that anything will triumph.
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The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution.
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Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation are directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry.
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I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me, I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
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At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless Neither from nor towards at the still point, there the dance is.
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Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful afterall
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I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you Which shall be the darkness of God. . . . So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
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