“One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.”

American poet, essayist and playwright

T. S. Eliot was an American poet, essayist and playwright. He was a leading figure in modernist poetry in English and won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature. He changed the shape of English-language verse through his style, his handling of structure, and his spare, often bleak tone. He is also known for critical essays that reassessed long-held cultural assumptions.