T. S. Eliot

I

Introduction

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-born writer, regarded as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. His best-known poem, The Waste Land (1922), is a devastating analysis of the society of his time. Eliot also wrote drama and literary criticism. In his plays, which use unrhymed verse, he attempted to revive poetic drama for the contemporary audience. His most influential criticism looked at the way the poet should approach the act of writing. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

II

Life

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest son in a large, prosperous, and distinguished family. Eliot’s father, Henry Ware Eliot, Sr., was a successful businessman; his mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, wrote prose and religious poetry. Eliot was educated at Milton Academy (a private boarding school outside of Boston, Massachusetts) and at Harvard University. He earned his undergraduate degree, after three years of study, in 1909. He then continued at Harvard, studying philosophy under George Santayana. Eliot received his M.A. degree in philosophy in 1910, after which he studied literature and languages at the Sorbonne in Paris, France; as a fellowship recipient in Germany; and at the University of Oxford in England.

After leaving Oxford, Eliot stayed in England. He became close friends with American poet Ezra Pound, who was also living abroad. In 1922 Eliot founded the literary journal The Criterion, which he edited until 1939. In 1925 he joined the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, which later became Faber and Faber. Throughout the late 1920s and the 1930s Eliot wrote, lectured, and taught in Britain and the United States. In 1927 he became a British citizen and converted from the Unitarian Church to the Church of England.

III

Early Poetry

Eliot’s earliest masterpiece, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” was published in Poetry magazine in 1915. Written as a dramatic monologue, the poem is an examination of the soul of a timid man paralyzed by indecision and worry about his appearance to others, particularly women. Anxious about becoming bald, and about his thin arms and legs, Prufrock hesitates in making even the smallest decisions or actions, wondering: “Do I dare / Disturb the universe? / In a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” Eliot’s first collection of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared in 1917.

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Two other well-known early poems are “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” (1919), which features an aggressive, fun-loving hero who is the opposite of Prufrock, and “Gerontion” (1920), which was originally designed as a prologue to the longer poem The Waste Land. “Gerontion” is a glimpse into the soul of an old man whose dreamlike memories wander through Western history from the 5th century bc to the 20th century.

IV

Later Poetry

Eliot earned international acclaim in 1922 with the publication of The Waste Land, which he produced with much editorial assistance from Ezra Pound. The Waste Land, a poem in five parts, was ground breaking in establishing the form of the so-called kaleidoscopic, or fragmented, modern poem. These fragmented poems are characterized by jarring jumps in perspective, imagery, setting, or subject. Despite this fragmentation of form, The Waste Land is unified by its theme of despair. Its opening lines introduce the ideas of life’s ultimate futility despite momentary flashes of hope: “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / dull roots with spring rain.” The poem goes on to present a sequence of short sketches following an individual’s baffled search for spiritual peace. It concludes with resignation at the never-ending nature of the search. The poem is full of literary and mythological references that draw on many cultures and universalize the poem’s themes.

The Waste Land draws much of its symbolism and narrative framework from the mythological story of the quest for the Holy Grail, the sacred cup that Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper. According to legend, only the pure of heart can attain the Grail. In the version of the Grail myth that Eliot draws on, a wasteland is awaiting a miraculous revival—for itself and its failing ruler, the Fisher King, guardian of the Holy Grail.

The Waste Land appeared in the aftermath of World War I (1914-1918), which was the most destructive war in human history to that point. Many people saw the poem as an indictment of postwar European culture and as an expression of disillusionment with contemporary society, which Eliot believed was culturally barren. His work The Hollow Men (1925), based partly on unedited portions of The Waste Land manuscript, takes a similar view.

Following Eliot’s conversion to the Church of England in 1927, qualities of serenity and religious humility became important in his poetry. Ash Wednesday (1930) shows his sense of how emotionally destructive life can be, but also suggests that everyday suffering may have a purifying effect.

The volume Four Quartets (1943) consists of four separate poems: Burnt Norton (1935), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942). Each of these can be read on its own or as part of the whole. Four Quartets addresses love, justice, the problem of poetic creation, history, and time—both immediate and fleeting, eternal and repeated. Little Gidding opens with Eliot regarding both notions of time by observing a winter warming, which is both brief and individual, and yet like all winter warmings that have been before or will come after: “Midwinter spring is its own season / Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, / Suspended in time…” In these lines Eliot uses the word sempiternal to mean eternal or everlasting.

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