“If there is one word on which we can fix, which will suggest the…” — T. S. Eliot

“If there is one word on which we can fix, which will suggest the maximum of what I mean by the term 'a classic', it is the word maturity.”

Making maturity central to Eliot's conception of the literary classic · Lecture, What is a Classic?

Art
Time

T. S. Eliot

About T. S. Eliot

26 September 1888–4 January 1965

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to…

More by T. S. Eliot