Quotes about T.S.E....

"I've asked the poet T.S. Eliot to dine with me...and he's a very nice creature".

--Aldous Huxley to Naomi Mitchison, May 1917

"That strange figure Eliot dined here last night. I feel that he has taken the veil, or whatever monks do...Tom, though infinitely considerate [of his wife], is also perfectly detached. His cell, is I'm sure, a very lofty one, but a little chilly. We have the oddest conversations: I can't help loosing some figure of speech, which Tom pounces on and utterly destroys."

--Virginia Woolf to Roger Fry, May 18, 1923.

"Edith Wharton found...[Prufrock] extremely 'amusing'...but relatively insignificant and interesting mainly as revealing the influence of Whitman...The Waste Land...seemed to her to lack even the enlivening presence of Walt Whitman; it was a poem, like Joyce's novel [Ulysses] ridden by theory rather than warmed by life."

--R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton, pg. 442 (1922)

"Ezra [Pound] lent Ernest [Hemingway] a copy of T. S. Eliot's new poem, The Waste Land...Ernest was unable to take it seriously"

--Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway, pg. 102 (1923)

"T. S. Eliot had come to Paris about then, appearing at the Dome and other bars in top hat, cutaway, and striped trousers. It was intended as a gesture of contempt and received as just that."

--William Carlos Williams, Autobiography (quoting diary entry) pg. 217 (1924)

"Now confidential: T.S. Eliot, for whom you know my profound admiration--I think he's the greatest living poet in any language--wrote me he read [The Great] Gatsby three times and thought it was the first step forward American fiction had taken since Henry James."

--F. Scott Fitzgerald to Maxwell Perkins, 20 Feb. 1924

"We stopped on the way at Oxford and bought a waist coat and some books--including T.S. Eliot's poems which seems to me marvellously good but very hard to understand. There is a most impressive flavour of the major prophets about them."

--Evelyn Waugh, Diaries, pg. 242 (1926)

"Eliot and I have our similarities and our differences. We are both poets and we both like to play. That's the similarity. The difference is this: I like to play euchre. He likes to play Eucharist."

--Conversational remarks of Robert Frost, reported in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, pg. 321 (1940)

"I went over to Marlow the other day and saw Eliot and his wife who have taken a house there. Eliot in excellent form, and his wife too; I rather like her; she is such a genuine person, vulgar, but with no attempt to conceal her vulgarity."

--Aldous Huxley to Julian Huxley, June 28, 1918.