Dear Carrol,

The shortlist of the most linguistically impressive moderns writing in  
English would not necessarily be the same as that for the greatest  
artists. ee cummings for example is a lesser artist  than Bishop but  
more adventurous and innovative with the medium.

Wallace Stevens uses language in new  ways but his content is  
unimpressive. What he writes is less significant than the way he  
writes it.

In my opinion Eliot not only innovates with polysemy, multiple subject  
positions and voices, disjunctive narrative and other formal elements,  
but does so to express content of great meaningfulness across the  
whole range of his output including his prose writing.

None of his peers displays that excellence so consistently in various  
kinds of writing.

Diana


Sent from my iPod

On Apr 24, 2010, at 2:33 PM, Carrol Cox <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> DIana Manister wrote:
>>
>> Hah! That's really funny! Eliot could English better than anyone of
>> his time, . . .
>
> Uh? Pound? Yeats? Joyce? Faulkner? Moore? Stevens? Woolf?
>
> I can't remember the title or othr phrases, but take a look at the  
> poem
> by Moore that contains the line, "We should like to know how that is
> done." "Englishing doesn't come next better in any time.
>
> Carrol
>