So Elegant, So Intelligent
T. S. ELIOT knew that his carefully constructed persona could be forbidding. He satirized himself, gently but tellingly, in a piece of light verse:
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.
[A review of WORDS ALONE: The Poet T. S. Eliot, by Denis Donoghue,326 pp., ew Haven:Yale University Press.]
The New York Times Book Review