GEORGE PLATT LYNE

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT,

Nobel Prize winner

After thirty-one years of influence in which fame and a little shock were mixed, T. S. Eliot joins the long list of Nobel Prize winners. Scholars and critics for years have written and fought about his poetry, his four plays, his essays with their "magisterial stare." Although he has long been a British citizen and an Anglo-Catholic, T. S. Eliot was born an American in St. Louis sixty years ago and was educated at Harvard. In 1917 his first long poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," was published. Inevitably he has been a mental pressure on the work of other poets; to many, *The Waste Land*, with its controversial imagery, was a major power in the search for psychological realism. His poetry, simple in words ("And sang within the bloody wood"), is profound in meaning and complex in references, often rooted deep in world literature, with phrases in Sanscrit, Latin, Italian, and French.

VOGUE, DECEMBER, 1948