by Ralph Badagliacca
Shakespeare shaped the language.
Some say he invented it.
Wilde and Shaw spun expressions of unrelenting wit.
Whitman taught the mother tongue
How to sing for us;
Yeats scaled the beauty of her lonely peaks.
Joyce uncovered something new,
And so did Eliot.
But unlike Yogi, none of them could hit.
Taken from Ralph’s book, The Yogi Poems, available here.Â
Yogi, T.S, Elliott
The Village Elliott: 6/15
Poets Yogi and me from St. Lou;
Thomas Stern is a third; we three flew;
By time Team Stinson balled,
“T.S. Elliott” called,
I played shortstop poetically, too.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis during the Gilded Age and moved to England before the Great War, after which he described the wasteland of the Lost Generation in what some consider the greatest poem of the Twentieth Century. Though he derided St. Louis as “provincial.” he is also quoted as saying, “It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.” Amen!
Lawrence Peter “Yogi” Berra, of the Greatest Generation, is from the Hill section of St. Louis; know as “Dago Hill” in my politically incorrect youth. Signed by the Yankees after serving in the Navy on D-Day, he moved to New York and earned three MVPs translating Stengelese into Yogiism . Among his neighbors were his best buddy, Joe Garagiola. and the older Harry Caray.
I’m a baby boomer from St Louis, alumnus of local Washington University, founded shortly before the Civil War by T.S. Eliot’s grandfather. Thirty years ago, shortly after I moved to Stinson Beach, and played shortstop on Team Stinson, I was called “T.S.” Elliott. When I started to seriously write poetry a few years later, it was one of my nom de plumes before being dubbed “the Village Elliott”.