Thomas Stearns EliotOM (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was apoet,essayist andplaywright.[1] He was a leading figure inEnglish-language Modernist poetry where he reinvigorated the art through his use of language, writing style, and verse structure. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.[2]
TheEliots were a Boston elite family, with roots in England andNew England. Eliot's paternal grandfather,William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved toSt. Louis, Missouri,[6][9] to establish aUnitarian Christian church there. His father,Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Louis. His mother,Charlotte Champe Stearns, who wrote poetry, was asocial worker, which was a new profession in the U.S. in the early 20th century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns.
Eliot's childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors. First, he had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital doubleinguinal hernia, he could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socialising with his peers. As he was often isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy immediately became obsessed with books, favouring tales of savage life, the Wild West, orMark Twain'sTom Sawyer.[10] In his memoir about Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot "would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living."[11] Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside thebig river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."[12]
From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attendedSmith Academy, the boys college preparatory division ofWashington University, where his studies includedLatin,Ancient Greek,French, andGerman. He began to write poetry when he was 14 under the influence ofEdward Fitzgerald's translation of theRubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them.[13] His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was published in theSmith Academy Record in February 1905.[14] Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" inThe Harvard Advocate,Harvard University's student literary magazine.[15] He published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". The last mentioned story reflected his exploration of theIgorot Village while visiting the1904 World's Fair of St. Louis.[16][17][18] His interest inindigenous peoples thus predated his anthropological studies at Harvard.[19]
Eliot lived inSt. Louis, Missouri, for the first 16 years of his life at the house onLocust Street where he was born. After going away to school in 1905, he returned to St. Louis only for vacations and visits. Despite moving away from the city, Eliot wrote to a friend that "Missouri andthe Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world."[20]
Following graduation from Smith Academy, Eliot attendedMilton Academy inMassachusetts for a preparatory year, where he metScofield Thayer who later publishedThe Waste Land. He studied atHarvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning a Bachelor of Arts in an elective program similar to comparative literature in 1909 and a Master of Arts in English literature the following year.[1][6] Because of his year at Milton Academy, Eliot was allowed to earn his Bachelor of Arts after three years instead of the usual four.[21]Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908 when he discoveredArthur Symons'sThe Symbolist Movement in Literature. This introduced him toJules Laforgue,Arthur Rimbaud, andPaul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard ofTristan Corbière and his bookLes amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot's life.[22]The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems and he became lifelong friends withConrad Aiken, the American writer and critic.[23]
After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at theSorbonne. He attended lectures byHenri Bergson and read poetry withHenri Alban-Fournier.[6][22] From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy andSanskrit.[6][24] While a member of the Harvard Graduate School, Eliot met and fell in love withEmily Hale.[25] Eliot was awarded a scholarship toMerton College, Oxford, in 1914. He first visitedMarburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer programme, but when theFirst World War broke out he went to Oxford instead. At the time so many American students attended Merton that theJunior Common Room proposed a motion "that this society abhors theAmericanization of Oxford". It was defeated by two votes after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture.[26]
Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls [...] Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead."[26] Escaping Oxford, Eliot spent much of his time in London. This city had a monumental and life-altering effect on Eliot for several reasons, the most significant of which was his introduction to the influential American literary figureEzra Pound. A connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on 22 September 1914, Eliot paid a visit to Pound's flat. Pound instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" and was crucial to Eliot's fledgling career as a poet, as he is credited with promoting Eliot through social events and literary gatherings. Thus, according to biographer John Worthen, during his time in England Eliot "was seeing as little of Oxford as possible". He was instead spending long periods of time in London, in the company of Ezra Pound and "some of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared [...] It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere."[27] In the end, Eliot did not settle at Merton and left after a year. In 1915 he taught English atBirkbeck College, University of London.[28]
In 1916, he completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on "Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy ofF. H. Bradley", but failed to return for theviva voce examination.[6][29]
Before leaving the US, Eliot had told Emily Hale that he was in love with her. He exchanged letters with her from Oxford during 1914 and 1915, but they did not meet again until 1927.[25][30] In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote: "I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society)."[31] Less than four months later, Thayer introduced Eliot toVivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridgegoverness. They were married at Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915.[32]
After a short visit, alone, to his family in the United States, Eliot returned to London and took several teaching jobs, such as lecturing atBirkbeck College,University of London. The philosopherBertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars have suggested that she and Russell had an affair, but the allegations were never confirmed.[33]
The marriage seems to have been markedly unhappy, in part because of Vivienne's health problems. In a letter addressed to Ezra Pound, she covers an extensive list of her symptoms, which included a habitually high temperature,fatigue,insomnia,migraines, andcolitis.[34] This, coupled with apparent mental instability, meant that she was often sent away by Eliot and her doctors for extended periods in the hope of improving her health. As time went on, he became increasingly detached from her.According to witnesses, both Eliots were frequent complainers of illness, physical and mental, while Eliot would drink excessively and Vivienne is said to have developed a liking for opium and ether, drugs prescribed for medical issues. It is claimed that the couple's wearying behaviour caused some visitors to vow never to spend another evening in the company of both together.[35]The couple separated in 1932 and formally separated in 1933, and in 1938 Vivienne's brother, Maurice, had her committed to a mental hospital, against her will, where she remained until her death of heart disease in 1947. When told via a phone call from the asylum that Vivienne had died unexpectedly during the night, Eliot is said to have buried his face in his hands and cried out 'Oh God, oh God.'[35]
In a private paper written in his sixties, Eliot confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of [Ezra] Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which cameThe Waste Land."[36]
After leaving Merton, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably atHighgate School in London, where he taught French and Latin: his students includedJohn Betjeman.[6] He subsequently taught at theRoyal Grammar School, High Wycombe inBuckinghamshire. To earn extra money, he wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses at University College London and Oxford. In 1917, he took a position atLloyds Bank in London, working on foreign accounts. On a trip to Paris in August 1920 with the artistWyndham Lewis, he met the writerJames Joyce. Eliot said he found Joyce arrogant, and Joyce doubted Eliot's ability as a poet at the time, but the two writers soon became friends, with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever he was in Paris.[37] Eliot and Wyndham Lewis also maintained a close friendship, leading to Lewis's later makinghis well-known portrait painting of Eliot in 1938.
About 30 years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament".[47] He also had wider spiritual interests, commenting that "I see the path of progress for modern man in his occupation with his own self, with his inner being" and citingGoethe andRudolf Steiner as exemplars of such a direction.[48]
One of Eliot's biographers,Peter Ackroyd, commented that "the purposes of [Eliot's conversion] were two-fold. One: theChurch of England offered Eliot some hope for himself, and I think Eliot needed some resting place. But secondly, it attached Eliot to the English community and English culture."[41]
By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. When Harvard offered him theCharles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932–1933 academic year, he accepted and left Vivienne in England. Upon his return, he arranged for a formal separation from her, avoiding all but one meeting with her between his leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947. Vivienne was committed to the Northumberland House mental hospital in Woodberry Down,Manor House, London, in 1938, and remained there until she died. Although Eliot was still legally her husband, he never visited her.[49] From 1933 to 1946 Eliot had a close emotional relationship withEmily Hale. Eliot later destroyed Hale's letters to him, but Hale donated Eliot's to Princeton University Library where they weresealed, following Eliot's and Hale's wishes, for 50 years after both had died, until 2020.[50] When Eliot heard of the donation he deposited his own account of their relationship with Harvard University to be opened whenever the Princeton letters were.[25]
From 1938 to 1957 Eliot's public companion wasMary Trevelyan of London University, who wanted to marry him and left a detailed memoir.[51][52][53]
From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat at 19Carlyle Mansions, Chelsea, with his friendJohn Davy Hayward, who collected and managed Eliot's papers, styling himself "Keeper of the Eliot Archive".[54][55] Hayward also collected Eliot's pre-Prufrock verse, commercially published after Eliot's death asPoems Written in Early Youth. When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed toKing's College, Cambridge, in 1965.
On 10 January 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot marriedEsmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber & Faber since August 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ceremony was held in St Barnabas Church,Kensington, London,[56] at 6:15 am with virtually no one in attendance other than his wife's parents. In the early 1960s, by then in failing health, Eliot worked as an editor for theWesleyan University Press, seeking new poets in Europe for publication. After Eliot's death, Valerie dedicated her time to preserving his legacy, by editing and annotatingThe Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft ofThe Waste Land.[57] Valerie Eliot died on 9 November 2012 at her home in London.[58]
Blue plaque, 3 Kensington Court Gardens, Kensington, London, home from 1957 until his death in 1965
Eliot died ofemphysema at his home inKensington in London, on 4 January 1965,[59] and was cremated atGolders Green Crematorium.[60] In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken toSt Michael and All Angels' Church, East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors had emigrated to America.[61] A wall plaque in the church commemorates him with a quotation from his poemEast Coker: "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning."[62]
In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, Eliot was commemorated by the placement of a large stone in the floor ofPoets' Corner in London'sWestminster Abbey. The stone, cut by designerReynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates, hisOrder of Merit, and a quotation from his poemLittle Gidding, "the communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living."[63]
For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced relatively few poems. He was aware of this even early in his career; he wrote to J. H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."[65]
Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small books or pamphlets and then collected them in books. His first collection wasPrufrock and Other Observations (1917). In 1920, he published more poems inAra Vos Prec (London) andPoems: 1920 (New York). These had the same poems (in a different order) except that "Ode" in the British edition was replaced with "Hysteria" in the American edition. In 1925, he collectedThe Waste Land and the poems inPrufrock andPoems into one volume and addedThe Hollow Men to formPoems: 1909–1925. From then on, he updated this work asCollected Poems. Exceptions areOld Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection of light verse;Poems Written in Early Youth, posthumously published in 1967 and consisting mainly of poems published between 1907 and 1910 inThe Harvard Advocate, andInventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, material Eliot never intended to have published, which appeared posthumously in 1996.[66]
During an interview in 1959, Eliot said of his nationality and its role in his work: "I'd say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I'm sure of. ... It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good; putting it as modestly as I can, it wouldn't be what it is if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America."[13]
Cleo McNelly Kearns notes in her biography that Eliot was deeply influenced by Indic traditions, notably theUpanishads. From the Sanskrit ending ofThe Waste Land to the "What Krishna meant" section ofFour Quartets shows how much Indic religions and more specifically Hinduism made up his philosophical basic for his thought process.[67] It must also be acknowledged, asChinmoy Guha showed in his bookWhere the Dreams Cross: T S Eliot and French Poetry (Macmillan, 2011) that he was deeply influenced by French poets from Baudelaire to Paul Valéry. He himself wrote in his 1940 essay onW.B. Yeats: "The kind of poetry that I needed to teach me the use of my own voice did not exist in English at all; it was only to be found in French." ("Yeats",On Poetry and Poets, 1948).
In 1915,Ezra Pound, overseas editor ofPoetry magazine, recommended toHarriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she should publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".[68] Although the character Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only twenty-two. 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 whenGeorgian Poetry was hailed for its derivations of the 19th-centuryRomantic Poets.[69]
The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading ofDante and refers to a number of literary works, includingHamlet and those of the French Symbolists. Its reception in London can be gauged from an unsigned review inThe Times Literary Supplement on 21 June 1917. "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation topoetry."[70]
In October 1922, Eliot publishedThe Waste Land inThe Criterion. Eliot's dedication toil miglior fabbro ('the better craftsman') refers to Ezra Pound's significant hand in editing and reshaping the poem from a longer manuscript to the shortened version that appears in publication.[71]
It was composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot—his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders.[72] Before the poem's publication as a book in December 1922, Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair. On 15 November 1922, he wrote toRichard Aldington, saying, "As forThe 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."[73]
The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation.[74] Dismissing this view, Eliot commented in 1931, "When I wrote a poem calledThe Waste Land, some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed 'the disillusion of a generation', which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention."[75]
The poem is known for its disjointed nature due to its usage of allusion and quotation and its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. This structural complexity is one of the reasons that the poem has become a touchstone ofmodern literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year,James Joyce'sUlysses.[76][page needed]
Among its best-known phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".[77]
"The Hollow Men" appeared in 1925. For the criticEdmund Wilson, it marked "The nadir of the phase of despair and desolation given such effective expression in 'The Waste Land'."[78] It is Eliot's major poem of the late 1920s. Similar to Eliot's other works, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary. Post-war Europe under theTreaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, Eliot's failed marriage.[79]
Allen Tate perceived a shift in Eliot's method, writing, "The mythologies disappear altogether in 'The Hollow Men'." This is a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante as anything else in Eliot's early work, to say little of the modern English mythology—the "OldGuy Fawkes" of theGunpowder Plot—or the colonial andagrarian mythos ofJoseph Conrad andJames George Frazer, which, at least for reasons of textual history, echo inThe Waste Land.[80] The "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" that is so characteristic of his mythical method remained in fine form.[81] "The Hollow Men" contains some of Eliot's most famous lines, notably its conclusion:
This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
"Ash-Wednesday" is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion toAnglicanism. Published in 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when a person who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for humansalvation. Eliot's style of writing in "Ash-Wednesday" showed a marked shift from the poetry he had written prior to his 1927 conversion, and his post-conversion style continued in a similar vein. His style became less ironic, and the poems were no longer populated by multiple characters in dialogue. Eliot's subject matter also became more focused on his spiritual concerns and his Christian faith.[82]
Many critics were particularly enthusiastic about "Ash-Wednesday".Edwin Muir maintained that it is one of the most moving poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect", though it was not well received by everyone. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of the more secularliterati.[6][83]
In 1939, Eliot published a book oflight verse,Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. ("Old Possum" wasEzra Pound's friendly nickname for Eliot.) The first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover. In 1954, the composerAlan Rawsthorne set six of the poems for speaker and orchestra in a work titledPractical Cats. After Eliot's death, the book was the basis of the musicalCats byAndrew Lloyd Webber, first produced in London's West End in 1981 and opening onBroadway the following year.[84]
Eliot regardedFour Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that most of all led him to being awarded theNobel Prize in Literature.[6] It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: "Burnt Norton" (1936), "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941) and "Little Gidding" (1942). Each has five sections. Although they resist easy characterisation, each poem includes meditations on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation to the human condition. Each poem is associated with one of the fourclassical elements, respectively: air, earth, water, and fire.
"Burnt Norton" is a meditative poem that begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present moment while walking through a garden, focusing on images and sounds such as the bird, the roses, clouds and an empty pool. The meditation leads the narrator to reach "the still point" in which there is no attempt to get anywhere or to experience place and/or time, instead experiencing "a grace of sense". In the final section, the narrator contemplates the arts ("words" and "music") as they relate to time. The narrator focuses particularly on the poet's art of manipulating "Words [which] strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden [of time], under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, [and] will not stay in place, / Will not stay still." By comparison, the narrator concludes that "Love is itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of movement, / Timeless, and undesiring."
"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 offers 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 strives to contain opposites: "The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled."
"Little Gidding" (the element of fire) is the most anthologised of theQuartets.[85] Eliot's experiences as an air raid warden inthe Blitz power the poem, and he imagines meetingDante during the German bombing. The beginning of theQuartets ("Houses / Are removed, destroyed") had become a violent everyday experience; this creates an animation, where for the first time he talks of love as the driving force behind all experience. From this background, theQuartets end with an affirmation ofJulian of Norwich: "All shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well."[86]
With the important exception ofFour Quartets, Eliot directed much of his creative energies afterAsh Wednesday to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer ofElizabethan andJacobean verse drama; witness his allusions toWebster,Thomas Middleton,William Shakespeare andThomas Kyd inThe Waste Land. In a 1933 lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility . . . . He would like to be something of a popular entertainer and be able to think his own thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which to do it."[87]
AfterThe Waste Land (1922), he wrote that he was "now feeling toward a new form and style". One project he had in mind was writing a play in verse, using some of the rhythms of earlyjazz. The play featured "Sweeney", a character who had appeared in a number of his poems. Although Eliot did not finish the play, he did publish two scenes from the piece. These scenes, titledFragment of a Prologue (1926) andFragment of an Agon (1927), were published together in 1932 asSweeney Agonistes. Although Eliot noted that this was not intended to be a one-act play, it is sometimes performed as one.[14]
A pageant play by Eliot calledThe Rock was performed in 1934 for the benefit of churches in theDiocese of London. Much of it was a collaborative effort; Eliot accepted credit only for the authorship of one scene and the choruses.[14]George Bell, theBishop of Chichester, had been instrumental in connecting Eliot with producerE. Martin Browne for the production ofThe Rock, and later commissioned Eliot to write another play for theCanterbury Festival in 1935. This one,Murder in the Cathedral, concerning the martyrdom ofThomas Becket, was more under Eliot's control. Eliot biographerPeter Ackroyd comments that "for [Eliot],Murder in the Cathedral and succeeding verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to practice poetry but it also offered a convenient home for his religious sensibility."[41] After this, he worked on more "commercial" plays for more general audiences:The Family Reunion (1939),The Cocktail Party (1949),The Confidential Clerk, (1953) andThe Elder Statesman (1958) (the latter three were produced byHenry Sherek and directed byE. Martin Browne[88]). The Broadway production in New York ofThe Cocktail Party received the 1950Tony Award for Best Play. Eliot wroteThe Cocktail Party while he was a visiting scholar at theInstitute for Advanced Study.[89][90]
Regarding his method of playwriting, Eliot explained, "If I set out to write a play, I start by an act of choice. I settle upon a particular emotional situation, out of which characters and a plot will emerge. And then lines of poetry may come into being: not from the original impulse but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind."[41]
Eliot also made significant contributions to the field ofliterary criticism, and strongly influenced the school ofNew Criticism. He was somewhat self-deprecating and minimising of his work and once said his criticism was merely a "by-product" of his "private poetry-workshop". But the criticWilliam Empson once said, "I do not know for certain how much of my own mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind."[91]
In his critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. "In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past."[92] This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous works, a "simultaneous order" of works (i.e., "tradition"). Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poemThe Waste Land.[93]
Also important to New Criticism was the idea—as articulated in Eliot's essay "Hamlet and His Problems"—of an "objective correlative", which posits a connection among the words of the text and events, states of mind, and experiences.[94] This notion concedes that a poem means what it says, but suggests that there can be a non-subjective judgment based on different readers' different—but perhaps corollary—interpretations of a work.
More generally, New Critics took a cue from Eliot in regard to his "'classical' ideals and his religious thought; his attention to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century; his deprecation of the Romantics, especiallyPercy Shelley; his proposition that good poems constitute 'not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence that 'poets... at present must be difficult'."[95]
Eliot's essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in themetaphysical poets. Eliot particularly praised the metaphysical poets' ability to show experience as both psychological and sensual, while at the same time infusing this portrayal with—in Eliot's view—wit and uniqueness. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets", along with giving new significance and attention to metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of "unified sensibility", which is considered by some to mean the same thing as the term "metaphysical".[96][97]
His 1922 poemThe Waste Land[98] also can be better understood in light of his work as a critic. He had argued that a poet must write "programmatic criticism", that is, a poet should write to advance his own interests rather than to advance "historical scholarship". Viewed from Eliot's critical lens,The Waste Land likely shows his personal despair about the First World War rather than an objective historical understanding of it.[99]
Late in his career, Eliot focused much of his creative energy on writing for the theatre; some of his earlier critical writing, in essays such as "Poetry and Drama",[100] "Hamlet and his Problems",[94] and "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama",[101] focused on the aesthetics of writing drama in verse.
The writer Ronald Bush noted that Eliot's early poems like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Portrait of a Lady", "La Figlia Che Piange", "Preludes", and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" had "[an] effect [that] was both unique and compelling, and their assurance staggered [Eliot's] contemporaries who were privileged to read them in manuscript. [Conrad] Aiken, for example, marveled at 'how sharp and complete andsui generis the whole thing was, from the outset. The wholeness is there, from the very beginning.'"[1]
The initial critical response to Eliot'sThe Waste Land was mixed. Bush noted that the piece was at first correctly perceived as a work of jazz-like syncopation—and, like 1920sjazz, essentially iconoclastic."[1] Some critics, likeEdmund Wilson,Conrad Aiken, andGilbert Seldes thought it was the best poetry being written in the English language while others thought it was esoteric and wilfully difficult. Edmund Wilson, being one of the critics who praised Eliot, called him "one of our only authentic poets".[102] Wilson also pointed out some of Eliot's weaknesses as a poet. In regard toThe Waste Land, Wilson admits its flaws ("its lack of structural unity"), but concluded, "I doubt whether there is a single other poem of equal length by a contemporary American which displays so high and so varied a mastery of English verse."[102]
Charles Powell was critical in his assessment of Eliot, calling his poems incomprehensible.[103] And the writers ofTime magazine were similarly baffled by a challenging poem likeThe Waste Land.[104]John Crowe Ransom wrote negative criticisms of Eliot's work but also had positive things to say. For instance, though Ransom negatively criticisedThe Waste Land for its "extreme disconnection", Ransom was not completely condemnatory of Eliot's work and admitted that Eliot was a talented poet.[105]
Addressing some of the common criticisms directed againstThe Waste Land at the time, Gilbert Seldes stated, "It seems at first sight remarkably disconnected and confused... [however] a closer view of the poem does more than illuminate the difficulties; it reveals the hidden form of the work, [and] indicates how each thing falls into place."[106]
Eliot's reputation as a poet, as well as his influence in the academy, peaked following the publication ofThe Four Quartets. In an essay on Eliot published in 1989, the writerCynthia Ozick refers to this peak of influence (from the 1940s through the early 1960s) as "the Age of Eliot" when Eliot "seemed pure zenith, a colossus, nothing less than a permanent luminary, fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon".[107] But during this post-war period, others, like Ronald Bush, observed that this time also marked the beginning of the decline in Eliot's literary influence:
As Eliot's conservative religious and political convictions began to seem less congenial in the postwar world, other readers reacted with suspicion to his assertions of authority, obvious inFour Quartets and implicit in the earlier poetry. The result, fueled by intermittent rediscovery of Eliot's occasional anti-Semitic rhetoric, has been a progressive downward revision of his once towering reputation.[1]
Bush also notes that Eliot's reputation "slipped" significantly further after his death. He writes, "Sometimes regarded as too academic (William Carlos Williams's view), Eliot was also frequently criticized for a deadeningneoclassicism (as he himself—perhaps just as unfairly—had criticizedMilton). However, the multifarious tributes from practicing poets of many schools published during his centenary in 1988 was a strong indication of the intimidating continued presence of his poetic voice."[1]
Literary scholars, such asHarold Bloom[108] andStephen Greenblatt,[109] acknowledge Eliot's poetry as central to the literary English canon. For instance, the editors ofThe Norton Anthology of English Literature write, "There is no disagreement on [Eliot's] importance as one of the great renovators of the English poetry dialect, whose influence on a whole generation of poets, critics, and intellectuals generally was enormous. [However] his range as a poet [was] limited, and his interest in the great middle ground of human experience (as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner) [was] deficient." Despite this criticism, these scholars also acknowledge "[Eliot's] poetic cunning, his fine craftsmanship, his original accent, his historical and representative importance asthe poet of the modernsymbolist-Metaphysical tradition".[109]
The depiction of Jews in some of Eliot's poems has led several critics to accuse him ofantisemitism, most forcefullyAnthony Julius in his bookT. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996).[110][111] In "Gerontion", Eliot writes, in the voice of the poem's elderly narrator, "And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner [of my building] / Spawned in someestaminet ofAntwerp."[112] Another example appears in the poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" in which Eliot wrote, "The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs."[113] Julius writes: "The anti-Semitism is unmistakable. It reaches out like a clear signal to the reader." Julius' viewpoint has been supported byHarold Bloom,[114]Christopher Ricks,[115]George Steiner,[115]Tom Paulin[116] andJames Fenton.[115]
In lectures delivered at theUniversity of Virginia in 1933 (published in 1934 under the titleAfter Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy), Eliot wrote of societal tradition and coherence, "What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."[117] Eliot never re-published this book/lecture.[115] In his 1934 pageant playThe Rock, Eliot distances himself fromFascist movements of the 1930s by caricaturingOswald Mosley'sBlackshirts, who "firmly refuse/ To descend to palaver with anthropoid Jews".[118] The "new evangels"[118] oftotalitarianism are presented as antithetic to the spirit ofChristianity.
InIn Defence of T. S. Eliot (2001) andT. S. Eliot (2006),Craig Raine defended Eliot from the charge of anti-Semitism.[clarification needed] Paul Dean was not convinced by Raine's argument but nevertheless concluded, "Ultimately, as both Raine and, to do him justice, Julius insist, however much Eliot may have been compromised as a person, as we all are in our several ways, his greatness as a poet remains."[115] CriticTerry Eagleton also questioned the entire basis for Raine's book, writing, "Why do critics feel a need to defend the authors they write on, like doting parents deaf to all criticism of their obnoxious children? Eliot's well-earned reputation [as a poet] is established beyond all doubt, and making him out to be as unflawed as theArchangel Gabriel does him no favours."[119]
The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions), edited by Michael North (2000)excerpt and text search
The Poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1 (Collected & Uncollected Poems) and volume 2 (Practical Cats & Further Verses), edited byChristopher Ricks and Jim McCue (2015), Faber & Faber
Selected Essays (1932); enlarged (1960)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, Volume 1: 1898–1922 (1988, revised 2009)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, Volume 2: 1923–1925 (2009)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 3: 1926–1927 (2012)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 4: 1928–1929 (2013)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 5: 1930–1931 (2014)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 6: 1932–1933 (2016)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 7: 1934–1935 (2017)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 8: 1936–1938 (2019)
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 9: 1939–1941 (2021)
^abcdefBush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds),American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, via[1]Archived 2022-04-17 at theWayback Machine
^Sanna, Ellyn (2003). "Biography of T. S. Eliot". In Bloom, Harold (ed.).T.S. Eliot. Bloom's Biocritiques. Broomall: Chelsea House Publishing. pp. (3–44)30.
^Eliot, T. S. (21 December 2010).The Waste Land and Other Poems. Broadview Press. p. 133.ISBN978-1-77048-267-8. Retrieved9 July 2017. (citing an unsigned review inLiterary World. 5 July 1917, vol. lxxxiii, 107.)
^ab"The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 – T.S. Eliot", Nobel Foundation, taken from Frenz, Horst (ed).Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901–1967. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969. Retrieved 6 March 2012.
^Worthen, John (2009).T.S. Eliot: A Short Biography. London: Haus Publishing. p. 9.
^Sencourt, Robert (1971).T.S. Eliot, A Memoir. London: Garnstone Limited. p. 18.
^Letter to Marquis Childs quoted inSt. Louis Post Dispatch (15 October 1930) and in the address "American Literature and the American Language" delivered atWashington University in St. Louis (9 June 1953), published in Washington University Studies,New Series: Literature and Language, no. 23 (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1953), pg. 6.
^Narita, Tatsushi (2013).T. S. Eliot, The World Fair of St. Louis and "Autonomy". Nagoya, Japan: Kougaku Shuppan. pp. 9–104.ISBN9784903742212.
^Bush, Ronald (1995). "The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/ Literary Politics". In Barkan, Elzar; Bush, Ronald (eds.).Prehistories of the Future. Stanford, California:Stanford University Press. pp. 3–5,25–31.
^Marsh, Alex; Daumer, Elizabeth (2005). "Pound and T. S. Eliot".American Literary Scholarship. p. 182.
^Literary St. Louis. Associates of St. Louis University Libraries, Inc. and Landmarks Association of St. Louis, Inc. 1969.
^Miller, James Edwin (2001).T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922. State College, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 62.ISBN0271027622.
^abKermode, Frank. "Introduction" toThe Waste Land and Other Poems, Penguin Classics, 2003.
^Davis, Garrick (2008).Praising it New: The Best of the New Criticism. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press. p. 2.ISBN978-0-8040-1108-2.A year after Eliot moved to London in 1914, he was introduced to Ezra Pound through a mutual friend, Conrad Aiken. Pound and Eliot soon became lifelong friends and literary allies.
^For a reading of the dissertation, seeBrazeal, Gregory (Fall 2007). "The Alleged Pragmatism of T.S. Eliot".Philosophy and Literature.31 (1):248–264.SSRN1738642.
^Obituary notice inChurch and King, Vol. XVII, No. 4, 28 February 1965, pg. 3.
^Specific quote is "The general point of view [of the essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion", in preface by T. S. Eliot toForLancelot Andrewes: Essays on style and order (1929).
^Radio interview on 26 September 1959,Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, as cited inWilson, Colin (1988).Beyond the Occult. London: Bantam Press. pp. 335–336.
^Seymour-Jones, Carole.Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. Constable 2001, p. 561.
^Bush, Ronald,T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History 1991, p. 11: "Mary Trevelyan, then aged forty, was less important for Eliot's writing. Where Emily Hale and Vivienne were part of Eliot's private phantasmagoria, Mary Trevelyan played her part in what was essentially a public friendship. She was Eliot's escort for nearly twenty years until his second marriage in 1957. A brainy woman, with the bracing organizational energy of aFlorence Nightingale, she propped the outer structure of Eliot's life, but for him she, too, represented .."
^Surette, Leon,The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Humanism, 2008, p. 343: "Later, sensible, efficient Mary Trevelyan served her long stint as support during the years of penitence. For her their friendship was a commitment; for Eliot quite peripheral. His passion for immortality was so commanding that it allowed him to ..."
^Haldar, Santwana,T. S. Eliot – A Twenty-first Century View 2005, p. xv: "Details of Eliot's friendship with Emily Hale, who was very close to him in his Boston days and with Mary Trevelyan, who wanted to marry him and left a riveting memoir of Eliot's most inscrutable years of fame, shed new light on this period in...."
^Mertens, Richard."Letter By Letter" in The University of Chicago Magazine (August 2001). Retrieved 23 April 2007.
^See, for example, Eliot, T. S. (21 December 2010).The Waste Land and Other Poems. Broadview Press. p. 133.ISBN978-1-77048-267-8. Retrieved 27 February 2019. (citing an unsigned review inLiterary World. 5 July 1917, vol. lxxxiii, 107.)
^Waugh, Arthur."The New Poetry",Quarterly Review, October 1916, p. 226, citing theTimes Literary Supplement 21 June 1917, no. 805, 299; Wagner, Erica (2001),"An eruption of fury",The Guardian, letters to the editor, 4 September 2001. Wagner omits the word "very" from the quote.
^Miller, James H. Jr. (2005).T. S. Eliot: the making of an American poet, 1888–1922. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 387–388.ISBN978-0-271-02681-7.
^"The complete simplicity of T. S. Eliot".Joshua Spodek. 22 December 2013. Retrieved7 November 2020.Little Gidding (the element of fire) is the most anthologized of the Quartets.
^Burt, Steven and Lewin, Jennifer. "Poetry and the New Criticism".A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Neil Roberts, ed. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. p. 154
^Washington, K. C. (6 January 2020)."Derek Walcott (1930–2017)". Retrieved7 November 2020.Heavily influenced by the modernist poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Walcott became internationally prominent with the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962).
^The three short stories published in theSmith Academy Record (1905) have never been recollected in any form and have virtually been neglected.
^As for a comparative study of this short story andRudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King", see Tatsushi Narita,T. S. Eliot and his Youth as "A Literary Columbus" (Nagoya: Kougaku Shuppan, 2011), 21–30.
Ali, Ahmed.Mr. Eliot's Penny World of Dreams: An Essay in the Interpretation of T.S. Eliot's Poetry, Published for the Lucknow University by New Book Co., Bombay, P.S. King & Staples Ltd, Westminster, London, 1942, 138 pp.
Brand, Clinton A. "The Voice of This Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T. S. Eliot",Modern Age Volume 45, Number 4; Fall 2003, conservative perspective.
Brown, Alec. "The Lyrical Impulse in Eliot's Poetry",Scrutiny, vol. 2.
Bush, Ronald.T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (1984).
Bush, Ronald, 'The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/ Literary Politics'. InPrehistories of the Future, ed. Elzar Barkan and Ronald Bush, Stanford University Press (1995).
Crawford, Robert.The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (1987).
Crawford, Robert.Young Eliot: From St Louis to "The Waste Land" (2015).
Crawford, Robert.Eliot. After The Waste Land (2022).
Christensen, Karen. "Dear Mrs. Eliot",The Guardian Review (29 January 2005).
Das, Jolly. 'Eliot's Prismatic Plays: A Multifaceted Quest'. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2007.
Dawson, J. L., P. D. Holland & D. J. McKitterick,A Concordance to "The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot" Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995.
Forster, E. M. Essay on T. S. Eliot, inLife and Letters, June 1929.
Guha, Chinmoy.Where the Dreams Cross: T. S. Eliot and French Poetry (2000, 2011).
Harding, W. D.T. S. Eliot, 1925–1935, Scrutiny, September 1936: A Review.
Hargrove, Nancy Duvall.Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. University Press of Mississippi (1978).
Hearn, Sheila G.,Tradition and the Individual Scot]: Edwin Muir & T.S. Eliot, inCencrastus No. 13, Summer 1983, pp. 21–24,ISSN0264-0856
Hearn, Sheila G.T. S. Eliot's Parisian Year. University Press of Florida (2009).
Julius, Anthony.T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Cambridge University Press (1995).
Kenner, Hugh.The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (1969).
Kenner, Hugh. editor,T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (1962).
Kirk, RussellEliot and His Age: T. S, Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century (Introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr.). Wilmington:Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Republication of the revised second edition, 2008.
Lal, P. (editor),T. S. Eliot: Homage from India: A Commemoration Volume of 55 Essays & Elegies, Writer's Workshop Calcutta, 1965.
The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Valerie Eliot. Vol. I, 1898–1922. San Diego [etc.], 1988. Vol. 2, 1923–1925. Edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, London: Faber, 2009.ISBN978-0-571-14081-7
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)
Maxwell, D. E. S.The Poetry of T. S. Eliot, Routledge and Kegan Paul (1960).
Miller, James E., Jr.T. S. Eliot. The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005.
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