September 26, 1888

T.  S. Eliot (September 26, 1888 to January 4, 1965) was the twentieth century's greatest poet. Anyway a friend of mine said that. (Thomas Hollweck). The perspective was different for Eliot once his fame settled in, once he had joined the Royal Society of Literature. We learned what this meant when his correspondence was published and reviewed:

.... Eliot, now a highly clubbable director at the London publishing firm Faber and Faber, reflects ironically that he had once been called a 'literary bolshevik’. Opening a piece of fan mail from a young man in Chelsea, the esteemed poet finds himself frankly informed that his admirer felt an 'overwhelming homesickness’ for The Waste Land after being disappointed by Ash-Wednesday (1930), his long poem on converting to Anglo-Catholicism. Replying to a friend who has asked whether its hallucinatory 'leopards’ and 'unicorns’ in Ash-Wednesday have a learned origin (like the many allusions in The Waste Land) Eliot grumbles: 'Can’t I sometimes invent nonsense, instead of always being supposed to borrow it?’. By the end of the volume, he is in the unhappy situation of having to explain to the wife of a young poet suffering from paranoia that The Waste Land could not possibly contain coded allusions to the couple.

Perhaps the criticism directed against this literary lion, lay behind Eliot's description of a cat who refuses to discuss what--

...THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.