(September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American
he moved to the United Kingdom
in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject
in 1927 at age 39.
The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement.
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
Mr. Aldous Huxley, who is perhaps one of those people who have to perpetrate thirty bad novels before producing a good one, has a certain natural — but little developed — aptitude for seriousness.
A dangerous person to disagree with.
It is a test (a positive test, I do not assert that it is always valid negatively), that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do more, and you are not yet decrepit enough to turn them down.
Let us go then, you and I,When the evening is spread out against the skyLike a patient etherized upon a table.