Scholars believe that T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) drew from Whitman's elegy in fashioning his poem "The Waste Land" (1922). In the poem, Eliot prominently mentions lilacs and April in its opening lines, and later passages about "dry grass singing" and "where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees." Eliot told author Ford Madox Ford that Whitman and his own lines adorned by lilacs and the hermit thrush were the poems' only "good lines" Cleo McNelly Kearns writes that "Whitman's poem gives us not only motifs and images of "The Waste Land"...but its very tone and pace, the steady andante which makes of both poems a walking meditation."