T. S. Eliot

Eliot eventually turned from poems and essays to the more public art of plays, all of which he wrote in verse. He also began giving lectures. By 1943 Eliot had given up writing poetry altogether, and he devoted his last 20 years to other kinds of writing.

Eliot’s earliest play, Sweeney Agonistes (1932), has two verse scenes and a prose epilogue. In this drama, Apeneck Sweeney, who is the same character from “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” is a modern, brutish, incarnation of a mythic Greek figure similar to Hercules and Agamemnon. In this work, Eliot used elements of vaudeville, combining slang language and slapstick songs with his more standard theme of the hopelessness of modern life.

Two of Eliot’s plays that examine religion are The Rock (1934) and Murder in the Cathedral (1935), which was based on the 12th-century English Saint Thomas à Becket, who was killed at Canterbury Cathedral.

Like his poetry, Eliot’s plays also incorporated ancient myth. The Family Reunion (1939) is a melodrama concerning a family curse. It draws on the Greek myth of the Eumenides, goddesses who are the guardians of justice. The Cocktail Party (1949), with which Eliot first won success as a playwright, explores the theme of salvation, but in the form of a modern comedy of manners (a play that satirizes social customs). Drawing on the play Alcestis by ancient Greek writer Euripides, The Cocktail Party presents a psychiatrist as an incarnation of Hercules, who rescued the princess Alcestis from the underworld.

In essays and lectures, Eliot profoundly influenced modern literary criticism. In the collection The Sacred Wood (1920), he contended that the critic must develop a strong historical sense to judge literature from the proper perspective, and that the poet must be impersonal in the creative exercise of the craft. As editor of The Criterion, he provided a literary forum for many prominent contemporary writers, including French writers Paul Valéry and Marcel Proust.

Sixteen years after he died, some of Eliot’s poems appeared in the unlikely form of a Broadway musical, when British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber brought out Cats (1981). Lloyd Webber based his production on a book of poetry Eliot wrote for children, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939). Eliot’s other works include the nonfiction projects The Idea of a Christian Society (1940) and Notes Toward a Definition of Culture (1948). Inventions of the March Hare: T.S. Eliot Poems 1909-1917 (1996) is a volume of 40 previously unpublished early poems. These poems include a fragment that Eliot had at one time included in 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' but which he ultimately removed. In the 1980s and 1990s, Eliot and his poetry were increasingly criticized for elements of anti-Semitism, racism, and sexism. Despite these unfortunate prejudices, most people continue to regard Eliot as one of the most important figures in modern literature.