Hell hath no fury like a Modernist in a housing development

Sparks are flying in Somerset this week to keep T.S. Eliot’s final resting place from becoming a waste land. The New York Times reports:

“Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,/Are removed, destroyed, restored…” T.S. Eliot wrote in “East Coker,” a poem in his famed collection “Four Quartets.” Now a proposal to do the first—build a development with 3,750 houses and an industrial estate on the edge of East Coker, in Somerset—has prompted protests from Eliot devotees.

Jim McCue, who is editing Eliot’s “Poems” for Faber & Faber with Sir Christopher Ricks, was disturbed to learn of construction plans so near to the spot where Eliot’s ashes are buried. “His final masterpiece,” Mr. McCue said by e-mail on Monday, is “deeply informed by his sense of place and of history.”

[…] According to Mr. McCue, many poetry lovers and academics, including Britain’s former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, are protesting “this planned desecration.”

But will today’s pro-Modernist protestors hang back muttering “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?” Our sources say nay. As of press time, novelist Jeanette Winterson is now onboard, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford and Harvard faculty have gotten good and mad, and actor Trevor Peacock has stoutly maintained that this whole thing is “stupid.”