CALL IT THE NEWSPAPER PROBLEM: About a decade ago I wrote an essay on contemporary poetry for a newspaper that will remain nameless and had the occasion to quote a line by “Eliot.” The editor sent back many changes, the most minor but telling of which was that the quotation was now attributed to “the English poet T. S. Eliot.” Vaguely piqued, I asked what the editor was trying to clarify: Was he afraid readers wouldn’t realize the quotation came from a poem? Or was he afraid readers might confuse the Eliot who wrote it with, say, George Eliot, the pseudonymous author of Middlemarch? Anyway, I noted that the “English” qualifier was misleading: Though T. S. Eliot had taken British citizenship, he’d been born in America. The editor, then, sent on another suggestion: “the American-born English poet T. S. Eliot.” I, having lost all the patience I had as a twenty-something-year-old, replied by modifying that tag to: “the American-born, British-citizen English-language poet, essayist, dramatist, teacher, publisher, and bank teller Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965),” after which the editor finally got the point and canceled the assignment.