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TS Eliot moves from wasteland to mainstream

His poetry is difficult, his images obscure, and when he gave a reading of The Waste Land in front of the Royal Family the Queen Mother got the giggles at “this lugubrious man in a suit”.
Yesterday, however, more than 90 years after the publication of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, the suspicion with which the British public usually regard modern poetry was laid aside when T. S. Eliot was announced as the nation’s favourite poet.

In a BBC online poll which seemed to eschew the obvious crowd pleasers, Eliot narrowly beat John Donne and Benjamin Zephaniah. John Betjeman managed eighth place while Rudyard Kipling, whose If was previously voted the nation’s favourite poem, did not even make the top ten.

Read entire article at Times (UK)