Diagnostic and symptomatic, accusatory and culpable, communal and personal, The Hollow Men is a poem about that which ails ...

If fame is the name of your desire, writing about literature is among the least likely ways to find it. From the 17th century until today, only four literary critics, John Dryden (1631-1700), Samuel ...

This article is a Cover Story selection, a weekly feature highlighting the top picks from the editors of America Media. How seriously should you take a doormat that reads: “Welcome. Just kidding.

“The question is not does love exist / But when she leaves, where she goes.” What’s that—something from Four Quartets? Actually it’s “Secrets,” by Van Halen. But how elegantly it expresses the problem ...

VIOLENT contrasts racked his life and art. His poems could be golden and struck by grace, split by the metaphysical hammer of God; but his most golden lines were yoked to an ironic, satanic vision of ...

Decades ago, biographer Lyndall Gordon made a vow: She would live to see the day a certain trove of T.S. Eliot’s correspondence was unveiled. Last week, the modernist poet’s letters to lifelong friend ...

In college one night, I got very stoned and read T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland.” I was gripped by it, and felt I understood it — a feat I’ve never come close to accomplishing since. Yet I don’t think I ...

Oh, the awkwardness of being known for something, then being asked to perform it on the spot. Groucho Marx is sitting at dinner in London in 1964 when his host, the poet and critic T.S. Eliot, asks ...