When he was a younger and a crueler man, T. S. Eliot once sketched himself:

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Ellot!

With his features of clerical cut,

And his brow so grim,

And his mouth so prim,

And his conversation, so nicely

Restricted to What Precisely

And if and Perhaps and But....

Whatever became of this unpleasant Mr. Eliot, whose brow was ever so grim, and whose mouth was ever so prim, the present Mr. Eliot is a mellow, gracefully old and skeptical man, who was perfectly relaxed before his Boston College audience Monday night.

He is much bigger than I expected, and his large, broad face swivels slowly around at the audience, alternately pointing sharp nose and sharper chin at text and people. His hair parts, clerical-tightly, very neat; and his steel-frame glasses glitter and twinkle angrily. He stoops a little, like an old professor, and stands reading without a gesture. The tone and what he is reading give one the sense of listening to the words of a great stone oracle. All this makes him sound much more formidable than he really is, for what makes this stone oracle in black tie seem human is its weary, benign expression, and its sense of the playful.

The voice speaks drily and deeply, and despite Eliot's accent, there are unmistakably American qualities in his speech: its slowness, precise, though not pedantic, and its American "--and--uh." You notice the Yankee in his talk when he reads the second part of "The Waste Land," Lines like:

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag

It's so elegant

So Intelligent

or