1965 No British poet’s death was more momentous (particularly among his fellow poets) than that of T.S. Eliot on this day. It was his stature as a patron, as much as a practitioner, which rendered his death the end of a literary period.
In his private journal, Ted Hughes (all of whose major works had been published by Faber, of which Eliot was senior editor) recorded that the death was
like a crack over the head. I’ve so tangled him in my thoughts, dreamt of him so clearly and unambiguously. At once I feel windswept, unsafe. He was in my mind constantly, like a rather over-watchful, over-powerful father. And now he has gone.
In the genuinely windswept wastes of Siberia, where he was in exile, Josef Brodsky wrote, on 12 January, the elegy ‘Verses on the Death of T.S. Eliot’. It begins (translated from the Russian): ‘He died at start of year, in January’ and clearly evokes Auden’s poem on the death of Yeats.
A continent away, in the Sewanee Review, Allen Tate wrote, with Dantean flourishes:
It was only several days later that I understood that T.S. Eliot was dead. One dies every day one’s own death, but one cannot imagine the death of the man who was il maestro di color che sanno1 – or, since he was an artist and not after his young manhood a philosopher: il maestro di color che scrivonno.2
Those who were not poets were less poetic in their response. Groucho Marx wrote in a letter:
I was saddened by the death of T.S. Eliot. My wife and I had dinner at his home a few months ago and I realized then that he was not long for this world. He was a nice man, the best epitaph any man can have.
The authors of this book were junior lecturers at Edinburgh University in 1965. On hearing the news of Eliot’s death, a less excited colleague remarked: ‘Then I don’t suppose he’ll be turning again.’
1 ‘The master of men who know.’ (Dante, Inferno, Canto IV, describing Aristotle.)
2 ‘The master of men who write.’