by T.S. Eliot
We mean all sort of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.—T.S. Eliot
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“All honor to Eliot–to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for poetic independence by humanity, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary poem, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing de-humanization and uglification.”–with apologies to our sixteenth president.