s muddy feet that pressnow a gusty shower wraps To early coffee-stands.grimy scrapswithered leaves about your feet With the other masqueradesnewspapers from vacant lots ; That time resumes, showers beat One thinks of all the handsbroken blinds and chimney-pots, That are raising dingy shadesat the corner of the street In a thousand furnished rooms.lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.then the lighting of the lamps. tossed a blanket from the bed, His soul stretched tight across the skies lay upon your back, and waited; That fade behind a city block, dozed, and watched the night revealing Or trampled by insistent feetthousand sordid images At four and five and six o 'clock; which your soul was constituted; And short square fingers stuffing pipes, flickered against the ceiling. And evening newspapers, and eyeswhen all the world came back Assured of certain certainties, the light crept up between the shutters, The conscience of a blackened streetyou heard the sparrows in the gutters, Impatient to assume the world.had such a vision of the street I am moved by fancies that are curledthe street hardly understands; Around these images, and cling: along the bed's edge, where The notion of some infinitely gentle curled the papers from your hair, Infinitely suffering things.clasped the yellow soles of feet Wipe your hands across your mouth, and laugh; the palms of both soiled hands. The worlds revolve like ancient womenfuel in vacant lots.for his work as a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry , Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. In the decades that followed, he came frequently to the United States to lecture and to read his poems, sometimes to very large audiences.Stearns Eliot s poetry received more critical acclaim than that of any other American poet of his time. Several of T.S. Eliot s plays had a successful run in London and New York.Pound wrote a few final words on the death of his old friend, ending with this passage: Am I to write about the poet Thomas Stearns Eliot? Or my friend the Possum ? Let him rest in peace, I can only repeat, but with the urgency of fifty years ago: READ HIM.
George Bernard Shaw
1856-1950Shaw was born in Dublin in a family of a civil servant. He was fifteen when he left school to become an office boy at a firm of land agents in Dublin. Being fond of the theatre he visited it from his earliest years and acquired so profound a knowledge of Shakespeare that he knew many of the plays by heart.the age of nineteen Shaw moved to England to spend his remaining 75 years there. In London B. Shaw had no intention of continuing office work and he spent a lot of time educating himself. He used to say: Though almost penniless I had a magnificent library in Bloomsbury, a priceless picture gallery in Trafalgar Square and another at Hampton Court without any servants to look after or rent to pay. I had the brains to use them. 1879 and 1883 he wrote five long novels, such as Immaturity, Irrational Knot and Love Among the Artists in which he tackled the problems of marriage and showed himself as the fighter for family relations built on spiritual understanding free from social and class prejudices. Other works are An Unsocial Socialist and Cashel Byron s Profession.the early eighties Shaw was deeply impressed by the increasing unemployment in London, being not far from poverty himself. At the British Museum reading room he read Karl Marx in a French version and From that hour I became a man with some business in the world. In 1884 B. Shaw joined the Fabian Society which based their activity on believing in slow development of different social reforms instead of revolutionary measures. He became one of the most famous public speakers, who was feared by every opponent for his sharp tongue and clear argument.this time Shaw was offered a job in the Pall Mall Gazette and in a short time he became one of the most popular critics of music, art and drama in London. He published several books of criticism on music and theatre, among them London Music, Music in London, Our Theatres in the Nineties. Nevertheless Shaw s attention was turned to the drama as a means of expressing the ideas crowding his mind. The long list of his plays opens with the cycle of Plays Unpleasant which marked the beginning of a new period in the history of English drama. This cycle includes Widower s Houses (1892), Phil...
