This week I ordered a copy of  Eliot’s ‘The Collected Poems & Plays’ to remind myself just how brilliant this poet was. As part of their recent poetry season the BBC ran two features on Eliot, the first being an Arena special on his life & works, the second a piece by Robert Webb on why The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is his favourite poem – needless to say, both were fantastic and made me want to pick up his poetry immediately.

Here follows a list of why I would *High Five* Eliot if I ever had the good fortune of travelling back in time to meet him:

• He looked like a bank manager
• He was a bank manager (I think)
• He wrote some great poems about cats
• A lot of people take his work very seriously – but sometimes he just liked to have a giggle. Like Kraftwerk.
• He’s my favourite example of someone trying the break language to get to the other side. But that doesn’t mean he always made it. 
• He introduced me to Chretien de Troyes
• He doesn’t make an awful lot of sense
• He got me to read French symbolist poetry. I am still recovering
• He used to live across the same stretch of river as me
• He was fond of umbrellas.

I guess what I’m really trying to saw is that I owe an awful lot to Eliot, and the teachers that introduced me to him. From trying to crack ‘The Wasteland’ at A-Level, through to reading his philosophical thoughts on Tradition (BA) and then his subsequent influence on postmodernism (MA), he’s someone that I’ve always gone back to. No doubt I’ll be sharing more of my thoughts on this poet as I plough through this small tome that I’m reading.

*High Five*