News at Eleven: Ezra Pound mounted campaigns to liberate [T.S.] Eliot

from his day job, complaining: "It is a crime against literature to let him waste eight hours per diem in that bank." It seems, however, that the contrary is true: it was very lucky for literature that TS Eliot did work in a bank.

Not only was the salary conducive to his great flowering as the poet of T he Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land , but the nature of his work proved a remarkable fit for the kind of poetry he began to write.

The Waste Land , a poem of collapse and disorder, where a straightforward narrative is dispensed with to mirror the fractured unity of the postwar world, found an echo in Eliot's day-to-day work as what we would probably call an analyst in Lloyds's foreign and colonial office.

from The Irish Times: The Poet And The City

~~~~~~~~~~~