When I started college ...

... T.S. Eliot was thought to be the greatest living poet and his influence was immense inside and outside the classroom. It wasn't always salutary. I remember seeing a lot of imitation Eliot among the works of my fellow apprentice poets. Of course, the problem with imitating Eliot is that what you get is just bad Eliot. That probably explains why, for all his influence, there is no Eliot school - as there is a confessional school, or a New York school. The point - or so it has always seemed to me - of Eliot's attention to tradition is that only by mastering tradition does one have a chance of emerging with an authentic voice.

All of this is by way introduction to this link to Patrick Kurp's post On Eliot (hat tip, Dave Lull). Like Patrick, I first came to know Eliot's work in my teens and, also like Patrick, it was the atmosphere that attracted me to them. Philadelphia was then still a gray industrial metropolis. City Hall, like all the other buildings in Center City, was black, encrusted with decades of soot. To this day, Eliot's "Preludes" is not only one of my favorite poems, it is one of the few works that can take me back to a specific time of my life, when I roamed the city and delighted in the melancholy of its often dark and rainy alleys, the clatter of the El, "the grimy scraps of withered leaves." Patrick's post caused me, in fact, to experience a rare and, I suppose, rather odd moment of nostalgia.