When he was ten his mother dressed him in a sailor suit for his first day at a new school. The other boys laughed at him, and the girls made fun of him for having ears that stuck out. He tried to fix the problem by sleeping with a rope tied around his head to hold his ears down. He also had trouble making friends at Harvard, where he went to college. He joined some clubs and went to dances and parties here and there. He lifted weights to try to improve his appearance. But in the end, he remained somewhat of a recluse. He didn't like his education at Harvard, and he hated Cambridge and Boston. He thought the nice parts were too pompous and the slums were too dirty.
After Harvard he moved to England, where he met and married a 26-year-old ballet dancer named Vivienne Haigh-Wood. They had known each other for only three months, and didn't ever become completely comfortable with each other. They slept in separate rooms, and Eliot couldn't even bring himself to shave in front of her.
A few years into their marriage, he joined the Church of England and took a vow of chastity. Eventually he started hiding from Vivienne, and when she came looking for him at his office, he would sneak out the back door. She went insane and died in an asylum.
Eliot said that living with a woman was a "nightmare" and something that didn't interest him. But when he was almost 70, he secretly married his 30-year-old secretary, Valerie. They were together all the time, and she made him very happy. He never left her side, and he wrote her a letter every week. They sat at home together, playing Scrabble over cheese and Scotch whiskey. His health was failing, but he brought her on a trip to the United States-to Texas and New York and Boston. They went out dancing at a boat party thrown by some Harvard students. He started telling practical jokes and became fond of whoopee cushions and exploding cigars.
He wrote a fan letter to Groucho Marx, who wrote back, and the two became close pen pals. Eliot displayed a portrait of Marx on his mantelpiece, next to pictures of Yeats and Val�ry. Eliot said, "This last part of my life is the best, in excess of anything I could have deserved." He said the only time he ever wrote about love and happiness was for his last verse. He wrote, "No peevish winter wind shall chill / No sudden tropic sun shall wither / The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only."
~ Writer's Almanac
"April is the cruelest month"
These are the opening words of T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (1922):
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Often used superciliously with mock sensitivity to the stirrings of spring, or as a joking reference to the April 15 income tax deadline.
not with a bang but a whimper:
a half-hearted, ignominious or anticlimactic end, a fizzle rather than an explosion.
The phrase is the closing of T.S.Eliot's "The Hollow Men"- the poet's gloomy view of the 20th century: "This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper".
