"We are here to pay a small and simple tribute to a great poet", begins the speech given by poet Ted Hughes in 1986 at the unveiling of the plaque to T. S. Eliot in Kensington, London. "Eliot moves at large throughout all variations of language and culture, claimed by all, as they become aware of him, and needed by all."

Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The plaque was unveiled in September on the morn of Eliot's birth to commemorate the American-born English-finished Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965), the first substantive poet in the Modern tradition. Hughes, supported by Eliot as a mentor, publisher and occasional editor, gave us a unique perspective on Eliot through his speeches and reading of the former's work.

Hughes continues:

The term 'great poet' is used too freely. And the variant 'major poet' is abused just as much. We are all aware of this. We know that truly great poets are exceedingly rare. And yet, during my lifetime, I have never heard Thomas Stearns Eliot referred to except as a species on his own, a great poet in an altogether more valuable and separate class of greatness than all those of his contemporaries, in our language, who are also frequently dubbed 'great'. In the latter half of his life, this was never seriously questioned. Somehow the consensus materialized, as if through instinct, among all his colleagues in the poetry of English, that he is not merely a great poet, but, finally, one that exceedingly rare kind, one of the ‘truly great’. And not only one of the truly great, but simply the poet of our times. As if there could be only the one.
From Ted Hughes' "The Truly Great", delivered on September 26, 1986

The plaque on a building streets away from plaques devoted to other literary icons like Ezra Pound (Eliot's friend and patron), James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall, Ford Maddox Ford and even Agatha Christie. Its location suggests a truth: Eliot was the avuncular heart of the London literary scene for the first half of the 20th century. Through his editorship at Faber & Faber and by his innate talent, he nurtured such poets as Marianne Moore (she is an erudite delight!) and future Poet Laureate Ted Hughes.

Eliot himself was by way of being something of a 'seer' = and a 'seer' of a scarce kind. It is precisely the clairvoyant quality of his vision of contemporary urban reality, the hallucinated depth and complexity and actually of it, which sets him apart from, and perhaps a little above, all other poets of the last three hundred years. The poem which presents this vision most fully, most nakedly, is The Waste Land.

From Ted Hughes' "The Song of Songs in the Valley of Bones" delivered on September 25, 1988

The great tower of a poem (read more here), which spoke to the darkest parts of feeling, coming on the heels of horrific warfare, "stands between the old world and the new..." and yet, is somehow a wholly accessible and thus famous poem.

The curious fact remains: this immensely learned, profound, comprehensive, allusive masterpiece is also a popular poem. And popular with the most unexpected audiences. I remember when I taught fourteen-year-old boys in a secondary modern school, of all the poetry I introduced them to, their favourite was The Waste Land.

From Ted Hughes' "The Song of Songs in the Valley of Bones," delivered on September 25, 1988

I read once that Hughes never once spoke to his father of the latter's experience in WWI. A hellfire of existence from which soldiers were expected to return and continue as if they did not see death in waking dreams. I wonder if the lines in "The Waste Land" are a reference to the apocalyptic nothingness when we fail to connect to our humanity   Read more from Wilfred Owen a young man who died in WWI but prior immortalized in verse a call for us to look into our darkness rather than triumph its success was a means for Hughes to understand his father's vast hollows of silence and pain. It was that for most of the world and remains as such today.

If Eliot was a 'seer', then what he saw was past the threshold of humanity into pure emptiness, trees that give no shelter, mountains that make no sound.

Wyndham Lewis's 1938 portrait of Eliot created headlines when it was banned from the Royal Academy of Arts for its not-so-subtle phallus in the top left corner. © The Estate of Mrs G.A. Wyndham Lewis: The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust.

"I'm inclined we ought to take this man." wrote Eliot on a note passed to him from a fellow editor at the London publishing house Faber & Faber. He was reading the poetry of Ted Hughes and instantly recognised what American publishers already knew: that Hughes was a significant talent.

 T. S. Eliot's handwritten response, "I'm inclined to think we ought to take this man now" when asked to review a collection of Ted Hughes' poems in 1957. Hughes was published by Faber & Faber shortly after to wide acclaim.

Eliot, whose poetry attempted to remove all aspects of the poet's personality, and Hughes, whose poetry is jackhammered in the bedrock of personal experience, differ in many ways. But both men are aligned on the greatness of the poet, the strength of the individual who writes the poems, and the importance of that character as a creative being.

In Hughes' poem "Famous Poet", part of his The Hawk in the Rain collection, we can't help but imagine he means partly a poet personified by Eliot.

Stare at the monster: remark
How difficult it is to define just what
Amounts to monstrosity in that
Very ordinary appearance. Neither thin nor fat,
Hair between light and dark,
And the general air
Of an apprentice - say, an apprentice house-
Painter amid an assembly of famous
Architects: the demeanour is of mouse,
Yet is he monster.
First scrutinize those eyes
For the spark, the effulgence: nothing. Nothing there
But the haggard stony exhaustion of a near--
Finished variety artist. He slumps in his chair
Like a badly hurt man, half-life-size.

Is it his dreg-boozed inner demon
Still tankarding from tissue and follicle
The vital fire, the spirit electrical
That puts the gloss on an average hearty male.
Or is it women?. ...
From Ted Hughes' "Famous Poet"

The two men undoubtedly saw something in one another greater than artistic sympathy, and their friendship lasted decades. In all the beauty and tempered reverence from Hughes in these tributes, his best lines are these: "[Eliot] stands in the centre of the cyclone of our modern apocalypse. And he speaks from that centre, as a unique, still point of awareness and eloquence."

He did, indeed. Who stands there now?