A few months before (T.S.) Eliot's conversion, he defined what alone constitutes life for a poet: it is the struggle to 'transmute his personal and private agonies' into something universal and holy...as he said, "what every poet starts from is his own emotions, which may be his nostalgia, his bitter regrets for past happiness." These regrets might become, for a 'brave' poet, the basis of an attempt to "fabricate something permanent and holy out of his personal animal feelings - as in the Vita Nuova."
- Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's New Life, pg. 3
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
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