T. S. Eliot

26 September 1888 (St Louis, USA) – 4 January 1965 (London). Poet, playwright, critic, editor.

Childhood

Thomas Stearnes Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, as the youngest of seven children. His father Henry Ware Eliot was originally from England. He was a businessman and at the time of T.S. Eliot’s birth he had recovered from a financial failure and was succeeding in business. The family was thus prosperous. His mother was Charlotte Champe Eliot, a former teacher who wrote poems. It was her who influenced T.S. Eliot most and who directed him towards literary culture. The relation to his father is often described as reserved due to the fact that Henry Ware Eliot was already growing deaf when Eliot was born. However, his connection in general to the family has often been described as very close.

Education

Until he was sixteen, T.S. Eliot attended Smith Academy in St Louis. In his last year there, he wrote short stories about the 1904 St Louis World’s Fair (an international exposition) which had impressed him much. These were published in in the Smith Academy Record. In 1905 Eliot departed for one year at the Milton Academy which was outside of Boston. This served as a preparation for his attending of Harvard. From 1906 to 1910 Eliot was an undergraduate student there and he obtained a BA in comparative literature and then a Master in English literature in the fourth year. In 1910 he went to the Sorbonne at Paris for one year before he came back to Harvard to study philosophy as a graduate student and to begin his doctoral thesis on F.H. Bradley. In 1914 he again left Harvard for Oxford and later London.

Life and Career

Having settled down in England Eliot started working as a teacher and later for Lloyd’s Bank. He married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a dancer, in 1915. His parents were shocked by this decision, and the marriage nearly caused a break between them. However, the marriage also marked Eliot’s beginning of an English life, taking his life in literary London. It was Ezra Pound among Eliot’s contemporaries who recognized Eliot’s poetic talent. In 1922 Eliot published The Waste Land which made his reputation grow and which is today still considered as one of the most influential poetic works of the twentieth century. In 1927 Eliot took British citizenship and by doing that he caused a furor [why?]. By 1930 and the next 30 years Eliot was an important figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world. Apart from his poetic work Eliot also became recognized as a playwright. In 1933 Eliot separated from his wife. He was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Eliot married Valerie Fletcher in 1956 and attained a degree of contentedness. He died in 1965 in London.

Works

In his work Eliot transmuted his affinity for English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century and for French symbolist poets from the nineteenth century into enormous innovations in his poetic technique and subject matter. The poems in particular express a disillusionment of a younger post-World-War I generation with the values and conventions of the Victorian era. In his criticism of poetry Eliot articulates a conception that demonstrates continuity with the thought of Romantic criticism and aesthetics. His central ideas also originate in idealist epistemology [what does this mean?]. The idealist epistemology is a position representing the idea that knowledge and personal thoughts do only exist in the individual's mind. T.S. Eliot's views were mostly based on the basis of a social and religious conservatism.

Selected Bibliography of his Works

Poetry

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

Poems (1919)

The Waste Land (1922)

Poems, 1909-1925 (1925)

Ash Wednesday (1930)

East Coker (1940)

Burnt Norton (1941)

The Dry Salvages (1941)

Four Quartets (1943)

The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)

Collected Poems (1962)

Prose/Essays

The Sacred Wood (1920)

Andrew Marvell (1922)

For Lancelot Andrews (1928)

Dante (1929)

Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)

Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)

John Dryden (1932)

After Strange Gods (1933)

The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)

Elizabethan Essays (1934)

Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)

The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)

The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)

Poetry and Drama (1951)

Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)

The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)

Drama

Sweeney Agonistes (1932)

The Rock (1934)

Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

The Family Reunion (1939)

The Cocktail Party (1950)

The Confidential Clerk (1953)

The Elder Statesman (1958)

Sources

Ackroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984.

Allan, Mowbray. T.S. Eliot's Impersonal Theory of Poetry. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1974.

Modern American Poetry.Ed. Nelson, Cary and Bartholomew Brinkman. 2011. Department of English, University of Illionois. <www. illinois.edu/maps/index.htm>

Academy of American Poets. 2011. <http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/18>