Wastelands and Coffee Spoons

If you're a bit nippy on the iplayer, you still have the chance to see the Arena special on TS Elliot. And what a blinder of a programme it is. TS Elliot carried himself like a bank official (which amazingly, he was for a long while), but he wrote poems that were fractured, contorted and layered like the wildest hip hop. In 1922, man.

He also had a strong belief in the Theory of Impersonality - the notion that the poem and not the poet was the thing to be trusted. And so, after his death, his estate guarded his life and reputation with ferocious zeal. There were occasional openings, such as the manuscript for The Wasteland, which showed the editing hand of Ezra Pound and effectively revealed the birth pangs of a modern classic.

But Arena was gifted the scrapbooks and memorabiia, the personal images and some charming extras. Such a coup The jarring moment came when they regarded his questionable pieces like Bleinstein With A Cigar. Was the guy anti-semitic? They didn't conclude either way.

Dylan namechecked him in Desolation Row, although Bob was more inclined to the French gutter poets that had informed Eliot in the first place. On a local level, we might have accepted Foy Vance with 'Afternoons And Coffee Spoons', which borrows from 'The Love Song Of JR Pruefrock'. The same Eliot poem is referenced by Andy White in Birds Of Passage, while Andy also lifts from The Hollow Men in his masterful song Speechless. Van Morrison of course, hails the guy in Summertime In England. You could hardly ask for better than that.