American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Soon, other such humanists were joining the Institute, including the archaeologist Homer Thompson, the poet T. S. Eliot, the historian Arnold Toynbee, the social philosopher Isaiah Berlin and, later, the diplomat and historian George F. Kennan. Oppenheimer had always admired Eliot’s The Waste Land, and was delighted when he agreed to come to the Institute for one semester in 1948. But it didn’t work out. Having a poet in residence didn’t sit well with the Institute’s mathematicians, some of whom snubbed Eliot, even after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature that year. Eliot, for his part, kept to himself and spent more time at the university than he did at the Institute. Oppenheimer was disappointed. “I invited Eliot here,” he told Freeman Dyson, “in the hope that he would produce another masterpiece, and all he did here was to work on The Cocktail Party, the worst thing he ever wrote.”