'Bernard Kops, the son of an immigrant leather worker, had a special understanding of the transition from from autodidact culture to Bohemia to youth culture, because he experienced all three. He grew up in the ferment of the Jewish East End... read "The Tempest" at school, and cried over "The Foresaken Merman". At fifteen he became a cook at a hotel, where the staff gave him Karl Marx, Henry Miller and "Ten Days that Shook the World". A neighbor presented him with the poems of Rupert Brooke, and "Grantchester" so resonated with the Jewish slum boy that he went to the library to find another volume from the same publisher, Faber and Faber. Thus he stumbled upon T.S. Eliot. "This book changed my life", he remembered. "It struck me straight in the eye like a bolt of lightning... I had no preconceived ideas about poetry and read 'The Waste Land' and 'Prufrock' as if they were the most acceptable and common forms in existence. The poems spoke to me directly, for they were bound up with the wasteland of the East End, and the desolation and lonelines of people and landscape. Accidentally I had entered the mainstream of literature".'