Happy Birthday Old Possum!

Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.

– T.S. Eliot

Continuing the theme of famous author birthdays (It's just never ending this week...), September 26 is the birthday of American/British poet T. S. Eliot, who would have turned 125!

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Even though Tom Eliot is often hailed as "one of the twentieth century's major poets," he did not have to write a lot of poems to achieve this status. He believed that the only thing that mattered is that his poems were "perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."

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The poem that made him famous is called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. After that, he wrote his most famous work The Waste Land. The famous quotes "April is the cruellest month" and "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" come from this poem. He is also the poet behind The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets.


Later on in his life, he wrote the book Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats for his godchildren (Eliot did not have any children of his own). In this book, he used the name "Old Possum" because it was the nickname that his good friend, editor and fellow poet Ezra Pound gave him. Although you may not have heard of this book of cat poems, chances are you have heard of the musical in which people jump around the stage in cat costumes. Yep, the Broadway musical Cats was inspired by this book!

To conclude this post, here are some lovely quotes from Old Possum himself:

The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.