Poet who wrote "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper"

ELIOT

This Modernist poet also penned The Waste Land and won the Nobel Prize in Literature; his initials spell a common first name.

The clue refers to T.S. Eliot, the famous modernist poet who wrote The Hollow Men, where the lines "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper" appear. The answer is simply his last name, "ELIOT," which fits the crossword’s letter count. No wordplay is involved—it’s a direct reference to his well-known work.