T. S. Eliot
(1888–1965)
T. S. Eliot’s literary career is remarkable in two ways. First, there is no poet of the twentieth century for whom critical esteem has been greater. Second, the influence he has exerted, as a poet and a critic, on other writers is without parallel in our time. Some critics have suggested that as far as poetry is concerned, the early twentieth century might well be called "the Age of Eliot."
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a family of New England stock. His grandfather had settled in St. Louis and founded the first Unitarian church there. He was also the principal founder of George Washington University and of Smith Academy, where Eliot himself received his secondary schooling. From 1906 to 1910, Eliot studied at Harvard, where he published poems in the literary magazine, The Harvard Advocate. He took a master’s degree in philosophy in 1910, and also in that year completed his first important poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." After a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, Eliot returned to Harvard and continued to study philosophy and linguistics while educating himself in French poetry and Sanskrit. In 1914 he was a graduate student at the University of Marburg in Germany. When World War I broke out, he left Germany and settled in England, where he met another young American poet, Ezra Pound. Pound recognized Eliot’s great talent and energetically recommended "Prufrock" to Harriet Monroe, the editor of the American magazine Poetry, where Eliot’s work first appeared for the general public.
Eliot did not publish a large number of poems. His first small book, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared in 1917, and it established the tone for all his early poetry. It focused upon the frustration and despair of an urbane, sophisticated life. Though others had dealt with the presumed glamour of the modern city, Eliot pictured city life as a scene of deep doubt and anxiety. His most famous poem, The Waste Land, appeared in 1922. It is a highly complex, puzzling poem about which commentaries are still being written. It depicts modern civilization as a spiritual void, empty of faith and meaningful love, and paralyzed by anxiety and boredom. Most of The Waste Land was written by early 1921, but Eliot was unable to bring it into final form. With Pound’s brilliant assistance, however, he condensed the various drafts and fragments of the poem into the work we know today. In the boldness of its ideas and the richness and power of its style, The Waste Land has had an enormous impact on later writers and on the general reader. The very term waste land has become familiar in everyday language.
In 1927 Eliot gave up his American citizenship to become a British subject. In the following year he announced his loyalty to the Church of England, a commitment directly reflected in the strong religious concerns of his later writing. Two of his most important late poems are Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943). Both of these long poems explore religious themes, suggesting Eliot’s conviction that the kind of spiritual desolation pictured in The Waste Land required deep, orthodox religious belief for its healing.
Early in his London years Eliot had also begun to publish essays that grew into one of the outstanding bodies of literary criticism in this century. In 1935 the first of a distinguished series of his plays was produced. His dramatic works, especially Murder in the Cathedral and a later play, The Cocktail Party, were performed often in this country and abroad. In 1948 Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
