While attending a meeting of the Oxford Poetry Club as a guest of honor one evening, T. S. Eliot was asked by an inquisitive undergraduate what he had meant by a certain line from Ash-Wednesday ("Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree").

"I mean," the poet answered, "'Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree.'"

[Eliot's verse remains an international phenomenon. A group of students at the University of Baghdad was once asked whom they considered to be the greatest "modern" writer. "The man," they answered, "who died in 1965."]