T.S. Eliot

File:Tseliot.jpg

T.S. Eliot (by E.O. Hoppe, 1919)

Thomas Stearns Eliot, (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was an American-born poet, dramatist, and literary critic, whose works, such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, and the epic Four Quartets, are considered defining achievements of twentieth century Modernist poetry. Eliot is widely considered one of the most influential poets of the 20th century. Whereas Ezra Pound was Modernism's greatest thinker, Eliot was its greatest writer. Eliot is often compared with Walt Whitman (though their styles could not be more different) as being one of the giants of American poetry, analogous to the position held by Shakespeare in England. Like Pound, Eliot had an extensive knowledge of the literary tradition, as well as the knowledge that in order for poetry to cope with the calamities of the 20th-century it would need to take on new forms or else expire. Perhaps moreso than any of the other Moderns, Eliot succeeded in this nearly impossible task, crafting poems which echo with the beauty of classical poetry, but at the same time deal with harrowing feelings of doubt and desolation which no poet living in Eliot's time, in the wreckage of two world wars, could possibly deny.

Life

Eliot was born into a prominent family from St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis; his mother, née Charlotte Chauncy Stearns (1843–1929), taught school prior to marriage, and wrote poems. He was their last child; his parents were 44 years old when he was born. His four surviving sisters were about eleven to nineteen years older than he, and his brother, eight years older.

From 1898 to 1905, Eliot was a day student at St. Louis's Smith Academy, a preparatory school for Washington University. At the academy, Eliot studied Latin, Greek, French and German. Although, upon graduation, he could have gone to Harvard University, his parents sent him, for a preparatory year, to Milton Academy, in Milton, Massachusetts, near Boston. There, he met Scofield Thayer, who would later publish Eliot's most famous poem, The Waste Land. He studied at Harvard from 1906 to 1909, where he earned his A.B. The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems, and he became life-long friends with Conrad Aiken. The following year, he earned a master's degree at Harvard. In the 1910–1911 school year, Eliot lived in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and touring the continent. Returning to Harvard in 1911 as a doctoral student in philosophy, Eliot studied the writings of F.H. Bradley, Buddhism, and Indic philosophy, (learning Sanskrit and Pāli to read some of the religious texts.)

In 1914 he was awarded a scholarship to attend Oxford, and before settling there he visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer program in philosophy. When World War I broke out, however, he went immediately to London and then to Oxford. Eliot was not happy at Merton and declined a second year of attendance. Instead, in the summer of 1915, he married, and, after a short visit to the U.S. to meet with his family, he took a few teaching jobs. He continued to work on his dissertation and, in the spring of 1916, sent it to Harvard, which accepted it. Because he did not appear in person to defend the thesis, however, he was not awarded his Ph.D. (In 1964, the dissertation was published as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.) During Eliot's university career, he studied with a number of world-famous philosophers including George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, Henri Bergson, C. R. Lanman, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim.

After leaving Oxford, Eliot worked as a school teacher and, to earn extra money, wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses. In 1917 he took a position at Lloyds Bank in London where he worked on foreign accounts. In 1925 he left Lloyds to become a director of the publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber) where he remained for the rest of his career.

In 1927 Eliot took British citizenship and converted to Anglicanism (on June 29). Eliot separated from Vivienne in 1933, and in 1938 Vivienne was committed to Northumberland House, a mental hospital north of London where she died in 1947 without ever having been visited by her husband. Eliot's second marriage was happy, but short. On January 10, 1957 he married Esmé Valerie Fletcher. In sharp contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Valerie well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August, 1949. As was his marriage to Vivienne, the wedding was kept a secret in order to preserve his privacy. Valerie was 38 years younger than her husband, and the years of her widowhood have been spent preserving his legacy; she has edited and annotated The Letters of T.S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land.

Eliot died of emphysema in London on January 4, 1965. For many years he had health problems owing to the combination of London air and his heavy smoking. His body was cremated and, according to Eliot's wishes, the ashes taken to St. Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from which Eliot's ancestors emigrated to America. There, a simple plaque commemorates him. On the second anniversary of his death a large stone placed on the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey was dedicated to Eliot.

Literary Career and Influences

Eliot wrote few poems throughout his career, thought he few he wrote were of lasting merit. He wrote very little during his life in America that would ever find its way into print, with the exception of the bleak early Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and most of his greatest poetry would not be composed until he had established himself firmly in the circle of Modernists living in Europe. This has led some to going so far as to categorize Eliot as more of a European than an American poet, though undoubtedly this distinction cannot be drawn so non-chalantly.

Eliot made his primary home, as a writer, in London. After the war, in the 1920s, he would spend time with other great artists in the Montparnasse Quarter in Paris, where he was photographed by Man Ray and associated with the likes of Picasso, Pound, Joyce, Proust, Williams, and Duchamp. French poetry was a particularly strong influence on Eliot's work, in particular Charles Baudelaire, whose clear-cut images of Paris city life provided a model for Eliot's own images of London. He dabbled early in the study of Sanskrit and eastern religions.

Following his conversion to Christianity and the Church of England, Eliot's work began to move radically away from the libertine and liberated styles of his fellow Moderns, and his poetry from this point onward is almost always religious in nature and is concerned expressly with trying to preserve historical English and broadly European values that Eliot thought to be of great importance in recovering from the cultural collapse of the early 20th-century.

Later in life, motivated by his strong religious and conservative feelings, Eliot gravitated away from the French symbolist poets that had influenced his early writings and towards the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell. It was their clarity of image and metaphor, combined with a profoundly complex and troubled faith in the spirit that would influence Eliot's later, religious epic poems, most notably the Four Quartets which draw much of their settings from their actual places where the metaphysical poets lived and wrote. In 1928, Eliot summarised his late beliefs well when he wrote in the preface to his book For Lancelot Andrewes that "The general point of view of the book's essays may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglican in religion."

Poetry

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended to Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Although Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only 22. Its now-famous opening lines, comparing the evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table," were considered shocking and offensive, especially at a time when the poetry of the Georgians was hailed for its weak derivations of the nineteenth century Romantic Poets. The poem then follows the conscious experience of a man, Prufrock, (relayed in the 'stream of consciousness' form indicative of the Modernists) lamenting his physical and mental inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, with the recurrent theme of carnal love unattained. Critical opinion is divided as to whether the narrator even leaves his own residence during the course of the narration. The locations described can be interpreted either as actual physical experiences, mental recollections or even as symbolic images from the sub-conscious mind, as, for example, in the refrain "In the room the women come and go".

The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri (in the Italian). References to Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and other literary works are present in the poem: this technique of allusion and quotation was developed in Eliot's subsequent poetry.

The Waste Land

In October 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion. Composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot—his marriage was floundering, and both he and Vivienne suffered from disordered nerves—The Waste Land is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. Even before The Waste Land had been published as a book (December 1922), Eliot distanced himself from the poem's vision of despair; "As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style" he wrote to Richard Aldington on November 15, 1922. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem—its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time; its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures— it has become a touchstone of modern literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year, James Joyce's "Ulysses." Like Joyce's novel, the poem itself is almost impossible to summarize, moving as it does between a wide range of voices and narratives with almost no indication given to the reader whatsoever. Still, perhaps because of this inherent confusion, the poem has become a landmark of the confused times in which it was written. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month"; "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and "Shantih shantih shantih," the utterance in Sanskrit which closes the poem.

Eliot's work was hailed by the W.H. Auden generation of 1930s poets. On one occasion Auden read out loud the whole of The Waste Land to a social gathering. The publication of the draft manuscript of the poem in 1972 showed the strong influence of Ezra Pound upon its final form, prior to which Part I had been titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices". Part IV, "Death by Water," was reduced to its current ten lines from an original ninety-two - Pound advised against Eliot's thought of scrapping it altogether. Eliot thanked Pound for "helping one to do it in one's own way."

Four Quartets

Eliot considered Four Quartets his masterpiece, even as many critics preferred his earlier work. The Four Quartets draws upon his knowledge of mysticism and philosophy. It consists of four long poems, published separately: "Burnt Norton" (1936), "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941) and "Little Gidding" (1942), each in five sections. Although they resist easy characterization, each begins with a rumination on the geographical location of its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation to the human condition. Also, each is associated with one of the four classical elements: air, earth, water, and fire. They approach the same ideas in varying but overlapping ways, although they do not exhaust their questions.

"Burnt Norton" asks what it means to consider things that might have been. We see the shell of an abandoned house, and Eliot toys with the idea that all these "merely possible" realities are present together, but invisible to us: All the possible ways people might walk across a courtyard add up to a vast dance we can't see; children who aren't there are hiding in the bushes.

"East Coker" continues the examination of time and meaning, focusing in a famous passage on the nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness Eliot continues to reassert a solution ("I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope").

"The Dry Salvages" treats the element of water, via images of river and sea. It again strives to contain opposites ("...the past and future/Are conquered, and reconciled").

"Little Gidding" (the element of fire) is the most anthologized of the Quartets. Eliot's own experiences as an air raid warden in the Blitz power the poem, and he imagines meeting Dante during the German bombing. The beginning of the Quartets ("Houses.../Are removed, destroyed") had become a violent everday experience; this creates an animation, where for the first time he talks of Love - as the driving force behind all experience. From this background, the Quartets end with an affirmation from Julian of Norwich: "all shall be well and/All manner of things shall be well".

Preoccupations of his poetry

Eliot was one of the most famous authors of the twentieth-century, and accordingly his poems emphasize issues such as:

• The further decline of the Christian religion, and of its associated cultural values
• The passing of time (particularly evident in 'Preludes')
• The decay of urban society (shown through deliberately ugly imagery and personification)
• People's ambitions being restricted by the mundane, repetitive nature of life and the human condition in general
• People living lives of endurance rather than enjoyment, with conformity and duplication replacing choice

Other works

Eliot's plays, mostly in verse, include Sweeney Agonistes (1925), Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958). Eliot admitted being influenced by, among others, the works of 17th century preacher Lancelot Andrewes in writing his plays. The dramatic works of Eliot are less well known than his poems, but are worth investigating, and over time have accumulated more and more scholarly attention.

Eliot is known for his critical and theoretical writing, particularly for his advocacy of the "objective correlative," the notion that art should not be a personal expression, but should work through objective universal symbols. There is fierce critical debate over the pragmatic value of the objective correlative, and Eliot's failure to follow its dicta. It is claimed that there is evidence throughout his work of contrary practice (e.g. part II of The Waste Land in the section beginning "My nerves are bad tonight"); but of course the worth of the idea is by no means negated by alleged lapses in practice, here as elsewhere.

In 1958 the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed Eliot (and also C.S. Lewis) to a commission which resulted in "The Revised Psalter" (1963). In 1939, he published a book of poetry for children, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats – "Old Possum" being a name Pound had bestowed upon him. After his death, this work became the basis of the hit West End and Broadway musical , Cats.

Criticism

Eliot's poetry was first criticized as not being poetry at all. Another criticism has been of his widespread interweaving of quotes from other authors into his work. "Notes on the Waste Land," which follows after the poem, gives the source of many of these, but not all. This practice has been defended as a necessary salvaging of tradition in an age of fragmentation, and completely integral to the work, as well adding richness through unexpected juxtaposition. It has also been condemned as showing a lack of originality, and for plagiarism. A prominent critic once published an essay called 'Eliot's Poetry of Pseudo-Learning'. Eliot himself once said, "immature poets borrow, mature poets steal."

Canadian academic Robert Ian Scott, for instance, pointed out that the title of The Waste Land and some of the images had previously appeared in the work of a minor Kentucky poet, Madison Cawein (1865–1914). Bevis Hillier, another critic, compared Cawein's lines "...come and go/Around its ancient portico" with Eliot's "...come and go/talking of Michelangelo." Cawein's "Waste Land" had appeared in the January 1913 issue of the Chicago magazine Poetry (which contained an article by Ezra Pound on London poets). But scholars are continually finding new sources for Eliot's Waste Land, often in odd places.

Many famous writers and critics have paid tribute to Eliot. According to the poet Ted Hughes, "Each year Eliot's presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble." Hugh Kenner commented, "He has been the most gifted and influential literary critic in English in the twentieth century."

Charges of anti-Semitism

Although he is regarded throughout the English-speaking world as one of the chief poets and critics of modern times, no discussion of his reputation would be complete without examining the charges of anti-Semitism placed against him. The poem 'Gerontion' contains a seemingly negative portrayal of a greedy landlord known as the 'Jew [who] squats on the window sill.' Another much-quoted example of anti-Semitism in his work is the poem, 'Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar', in which Eliot implicitly finds the Jews responsible for the decline of Venice ('The rats are underneath the piles. | The Jew is underneath the lot'). Even so, Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia Woolf, who was himself Jewish and a friend of Eliot's, judged that Eliot was probably 'slightly anti-Semitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon. He would have denied it quite genuinely' (Ackroyd, T.S. Eliot, Abacus, 1985: 304).

Nevertheless, in his minor work "After Strange Gods" (1933), Eliot deprecates the presence of 'free-thinking Jews,' who are said to be 'undesirable' in large numbers. The philosopher George Boas, who had previously been on friendly terms with Eliot, wrote to him that, 'I can at least rid you of the company of one.' Eliot did not reply.

In later years Eliot expressed his regret over these remarks (disavowing the book, and refusing to allow any part to be reprinted), saying he was not in good health when he gave the lectures in which they were first expressed.

Recognition

Formal recognition

• Order of Merit (awarded by King George VI (United Kingdom), 1948)
• Nobel Prize for Literature "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry" (Stockholm, 1948)
• Officier de la Legion d'Honneur (1951)
• Hanseatic Goethe Prize (Hamburg, 1955)
• Dante Medal (Florence, 1959)
• Commandeur de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres, (1960)
• Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964)
• 13 honorary doctorates (including Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and Harvard)
• Two posthumous Tony Awards (1983) for his poems used in the musical Cats
• Eliot College of the University of Kent, England, named after him

Popular recognition

• In 1941, Henry Reed published Chard Whitlow, an intelligent and witty satire on Burnt Norton. Eliot wrote, "Most parodies of one's own work strike one as very poor. In fact, one is apt to think one could parody oneself much better. (As a matter of fact, some critics have said that I have done so.) But there is one which deserves the success it has had, Henry Reed's Chard Whitlow."
• "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a greatly quoted and referenced piece. References have appeared in Hill Street Blues and The Long Goodbye by detective novelist Raymond Chandler.
• In the movie Apocalypse Now, based on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness, one of the side-characters, a photographer obsessed with the life of the elusive Colonel Kurtz, quoted "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," specifically the lines, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Marlon Brando's character Kurtz later reads Eliot's poem The Hollow Men: "We are the Hollow Men, We are the stuffed men...". Appropriately, Eliot's poem The Hollow Men quotes Heart of Darkness in its epigraph — "Mistah Kurtz—he dead."
• In the autobiographical A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken's admiration for Eliot's poetry lends credibility in Vanauken's eyes to Christianity and plays a part, along with letters from C. S. Lewis, in his conversion.
• A favorite of present-day Christians is "Choruses from 'The Rock'," a poem decrying what Eliot saw as the decadence of Western thought from the sublime (the Word as the Revelation of God, wisdom, life) to the humdrum (information, living).
• Liverpool poet Adrian Henri included "Poem in Memoriam T.S. Eliot" in the best-selling 1968 anthology The Mersey Sound.
• The Simon and Garfunkel song "The Dangling Conversation," more famously covered by Joan Baez, is a reinterpretation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
• The band Crash Test Dummies released a song called "Afternoons & Coffeespoons" from the album God Shuffled His Feet in the early 1990s. This song, too, borrows from and pays homage to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
• "The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was also referenced by Chuck D of the seminal rap group Public Enemy, in Niggativaty, Do I Dare Disturb the Universe, on his solo album The Autobiography of Mistachuck.
• In Bob Dylan's song "Desolation Row", Ezra Pound and Eliot fight in the captain's tower.

Bibliography

Poetry

• Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
• Poems (1920)
• The Waste Land (1922)
• The Hollow Men (1925)
• The Journey of the Magi (1927)
• Ash Wednesday (1930)
• Ariel Poems (1930)
• Coriolan (1931)
• Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)
• Four Quartets (1945)

Plays

• Sweeney Agonistes (published in 1926, first performed in 1934)
• The Rock (1934)
• Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
• The Family Reunion (1939)
• The Cocktail Party (1949)
• The Confidential Clerk (1954)
• The Elder Statesman (first performed in 1958, published in 1959)

Nonfiction

• The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920)
• The Second-Order Mind (1920)
• Homage to John Dryden (1924)
• Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1928)
• For Lancelot Andrewes (1928)
• Dante (1929)
• Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (1932)
• The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
• After Strange Gods (1934)
• Elizabethan Essays (1934)
• Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)
• The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)
• Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948)
• Poetry and Drama (1951)
• The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)
• On Poetry and Poets (1957)

Further reading

• Ackroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot: A Life. (1984)
• Bush, Ronald. T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. (1984)
• Christensen, Karen. "Dear Mrs. Eliot," The Guardian Review. (29 January 2005).
• Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot. (1987).
• Gardner, Helen. The Composition of Four Quartets. (1978).
• ---The Art of T.S. Eliot. (1949)
• The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Ed. by Valerie Eliot. Vol. I, 1898-1922. San Diego [etc.] 1988.
• Gordon, Lyndall. T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. (1998)
• Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. (1969)
• Levy, William Turner and Victor Scherle. Affectionately, T.S. Eliot: The Story of a Friendship: 1947-1965. (1968).
• Matthews, T.S. Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T.S. Eliot. (1973)
• James E. Miller, Jr.: T. S. Eliot. The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005.
• Quillian, William H. Hamlet and the new poetic: James Joyce and T.S. Eliot . Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983.
• Ricks, Christopher.T.S. Eliot and Prejudice. (1988).
• Ronald Schuchard. Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. (1999).
• Carole Seymour-Jones. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. (2001).
• Robert Sencourt. T.S.Eliot: A Memoir. (1971).
• Spender, Stephen. T.S. Eliot. (1975).
• Sinha, Arun Kumar and Vikram, Kumar. T. S Eliot: An Intensive Study of Selected Poems, Spectrum Books Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi, (2005).

Notes

1. ^  Richardson, John Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters Random House, 2001. ISBN 0-67942490-3, page 20

External links

• Works by T. S. Eliot. Project Gutenberg
• What the Thunder Said: T.S. Eliot
• The T.S. Eliot Page
• T.S. Eliot Collection at Bartleby.com
• T.S. Eliot Hypertext Project
• Nobel prize
• Eliot's Prufrock Text and extended audio discussion of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
• Composition of The Waste Land
• Fascimile manuscript of Part III of The Waste Land
• The Eliot Prufrock page
• Bevis Hillier on Eliot and Cawein (pdf)
• Online concordance of Eliot poems
• Eliot family genealogy, including T. S. Eliot
• Time in Marburg, Germany (in German)
• Recordings of Eliot reading from Prufrock and The Waste Land

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• T.S. Eliot  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "T.S. Eliot"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.