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T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot (1888-1965) |
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American-English poet, playwright, and critic, a leader of the modernist movement in literature. T.S. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. His most famous work is The Waste Land, written when he was 34. On one level this highly complex poem descibes cultural and spiritual crisis. The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which becomes important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. (from 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1920), The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Essays, selected, with foreword and notes by Ian Hamilton, 2000, pp.29-30) Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and youngest child of a distinguished family of New England origin. Eliot's forebears included the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, founder of Washington University in St. Louis. Isaac Stearns on his mother's side was one of the original settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Henry, Eliot's father, was a prosperous industrialist and his mother Charlotte was a poet. She wrote among others a biography of William Greenleaf Eliot. Eliot attended Smith Academy in St. Louis and Milton Academy in Massachusetts. In 1906 he went to Harvard, where he contributed poetry to Harvard Advocate. After receiving his B.A. in 1909, Eliot spent a year in France, attending Henri Bergson's lectures at the Sorbonne and studying poetry with the novelist and poet Henri Alain-Fournier. He then returned to Harvard, where he worked on a dissertation on the English idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley. Eliot also studied Sanskrit and Buddhism. When Bertrand Russell met Eliot in New Oxford Street in London in October 1914, he asked him what he thought of the War. "I don't know," he said, "I only know that I am not a pacifist." (Autobiography by Bertrand Russell, Routledge, 2010, p. 229) The next year Eliot made England his permanent home. For a period Russell lent the Eliots one of the two bedrooms of his flat. With Ezra Pound, his countryman and an advocate on literary modernism, he started to reform poetic diction. Pound was largely responsible for getting Eliot's early poems into print, such as 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' in the Chicago magazine Poetry in 1915. The title character is tormented by the uncertainty of his identity and the difficulty of articulating his feelings. Prufrock is a perfect gentleman and tragic in his conventionality. He has heard "the mermaids singing, each to each" but is trapped by his image of himself - "I do not think that they will sing to me." (from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' in Poems 1909–1925, Faber & Faber, 1934, p. 19; first published in 1925) Pound also introduced Eliot to Harriet Weaver, who published
Eliot's first volume of verse, Prufrock and Other
Observations (1917). Eliot taught for a year at Highgate
Junior School in London, and then worked as a clerk at Lloyds Bank,
where he wrote acticles for the monthly in-house magazine Lloyds
Bank Economic Review on foreign currency movements. A physical
condition prevented his entering in 1918 the US Navy. Eliot's second
book, Ara Vos Prec (published in
the U.S. as Poems), which appeared in 1919, was hand-printed by Virginia and Leonard Woolf
at the Hogath Press. His outward appearance proclaimed normality and
respectability: he wore City trousers, slate-blue with black stripes,
and a black business coat with a bowler andf grey spats. In an early essay, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919), Eliot propounded the doctrine, that poetry should be impersonal and free itself from Romantic practices. "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." (Ibid., The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Essays p. 27) Eliot saw that in this depersonalization the art approaches science. With his collection of essays, The Sacred Wood (1920), and later published The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) and The Classics and the Man of Letters (1942), Eliot established his reputation as a literary critic. In 1922 Eliot founded the Criterion, a quarterly review that he edited until he halted its publication at the beginning of World War II. He run the magazine without an office, and without a salary. With the help of Pound, who had raised money from friends and patrons, Eliot left the bank. Before this crucial step, he suffered a serious jaw infection. In 1925 Eliot joined the publishing house of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), becoming eventually one of the firm's directors. Between the years 1917 and 1919, Eliot was an assistant editor of the journal the Egoist. From 1919 onward he was a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement. In
the 60 years from 1905 to his death, Eliot published some
600
articles and reviews. Eliot's principal purpose in his
literary-critical essays was "the elucidation of works of art and the
correction of taste." He wanted to revive the appreciation of the
17th-century "Metaphysical poets," referring to such writers as Donne,
Crashaw, Vaughan, Lord Herbert, and Cowley. He admitted that it is
extremely difficult to define metaphysical poetry and decide what poets
practiced it, but praised the complex mixture of intellect and passion
that characterized their work. In the essay 'Religion and Literature'
(1935) Eliot stated: "Literary criticism should be completed by
criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far
as in any age there is a common agreement on ethical and theological
matters, so far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our
own, in which there is no such common agreement, it is the more
nesessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially
of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological
standards." (Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited with an introduction by Frank Kermode, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976, p. 97) Eliot's first marriage from 1915 with the ballet-dancer
Vivienne
Haigh-Wood turned out to be unhappy. She was temperamental, full of
life, restless. Her arrival at menstruation brought extreme mood
swings, pains and cramps; her condition was diagnosed as hysteria. From
1930 until her death in 1947 she was confined in mental institutions.
Later Eliot married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher. Carole
Seymour-Jones has argued in Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot
(2001) that Eliot's sexual orientation was fundamentally gay. Eliot
avoided sharing bed with Vivienne, who started an affair with Bertrand
Russell. Virginia Woolf said: "He was one of those poets who live
by scratching, and his wife was his itch." (quoted in Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot, p. 469) When Eliot vivited Paris with Wyndham Lewis in mid-August 1920, he stayed in the Hôtel Elysée (now gone) on the Rue de Beaune, probably upon the recommendation of Pound, who had taken a room in this hotel in June. They brought a box of old shoes that Pound had intended as a gift for Joyce. The hotel he frequented in Paris from time to time was the Hôtel Foyot (now the square of Francis-Poulenc, en empty lot) on the Rue de Tournon. It was famous for its restaurant. Also such writers as Louis Aragon, Mary Butts,George Moore, Dorothy Parker, and Rainer Maria Rilke rented a room at the hotel. Eliot and Vivienne were stricken by the Spanish influenza in December 1918; most of The Waste Land was written while he was recovering from the virus. After a physical and mental breakdown in 1921, Eliot went to Lausanne for treatment. There he completedhis poetic exploration of soul's - or civilization's - struggle for regeneration. Following Pound's suggestion, Eliot reduced The Waste Land to about half its original length, but Pound was not responsible for the form of the poem, its transitions, or lack of them. The first version, with Pound's revisions, was published in 1971. Eliot's long poem, which caught the mood of confusion and
feelings
of nostalgia for a "paradise lost" after World War I, was not
unanimously hailed as a masterpiece. Conrad Aiken noted that "What we
feel is that Mr. Eliot has not wholly annealed the allusive material,
has left it unabsorbed", but Aiken also argued that the poem succeeds
"by virtue of its incoherence, not of its plan; by virtue of its
ambiguities, not of its explanations." (New Republic,
February
7, 1923) To critics who said that Eliot had expressed the
"disillusionment of a generation" the poet himself answered that is was nonsense. "I may
have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but
that did not form part of my intention." ('Thoughts after Lambeth,' 1931, Selected Essays, Faber and Faber, 1932, p. 358) Divided into five sections, The Waste Land is a series
of
fragmentary dramatic monologues, a dense chorus of voices and culture
historical quotations, vernacular slang and scholarly language, that
fade one into another. In the center is the
immortal prophet Tiresias. The waste land is contrasted with sources of
regeneration, and Christian and Eastern
religious practices. Like Igor Stravinsky in The Rite of Spring(1913),
Eliot combined ancient fertility rituals with the breakdown of modern
civilization. Many parts of the poem are located in the
banking area of London, where Eliot worked. At the same time the city
is unreal, populated by miserable souls like in Dante's Inferno. Material for the work Eliot drew from several sources, among them the Grail story, the legend of the Fisher King, Sir James George Frazer's Golden Bough, and Dante's Commedia, but when Dante finally is reunited with Beatrice in 'Heaven', The Waste Land ends ambiguously with a few words of Sanskrit. In a way the work, bristling with symbols, quotations and references, fulfilled Eliot's "impersonal theory of poetry": "The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to from a new compound are present together." ('Tradition and the Individual Talent,' in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Essays, p. 29) In Part V Eliot refers to Ernest
Shackleton's hallucination during the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic
Expedition: "Who is the third who walks always beside
you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I
look ahead up the white road / There is always another walking beside
you". (The Waste Land, Boni and Liveright, 1922, p. 43) Actually, Shackleton was accompanied by two members of his crew.
This is what he wrote in the 1920 edition of South: The Story of Shackleton's Last
Expedition, 1914-1917:
"I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours
over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it seemed to
me often that we were four, not three. I said nothing to my companions
on the point, but afterwards Worsley said to me, 'Boss, I had a curious
feeling on the march that there was another person with us.'" (Ibid., p. 211) The
Third Man Syndrome, a curious psychological condition, got its name
from Eliot's poem. In 1927 Eliot became a British citizen and member of the Church of England. His way towards his own particular brand of High Anglicanism may be charted in his poetry, starting from 'The Hollow Men' (1925) to visions in Four Quartets (135-42), which Eliot himself regarded as his masterpiece. It consisted of four poems, 'Burnt Norton,' 'East Coker,' 'The Dry Salvages,' and 'Little Gidding,' into which he integrated his experiences in World War II as a watchman checking for fires during bombing raids. These quartets represent the four seasons and four elements. Helen Gardner has said in her study of the poem that "Eliot, who was often evasive in comments on his earlier poetry, was never evasive about Four Quartets. He was willing to talk about the poem and to give direct answers to questions. In speaking of it he never employed the defensive irony that marks so many of his references to The Waste Land. He never suggested that he did not himself know 'what he meant' and that a reader's guess was as good as the author's." (The Composition of Four Quartets, Faber & Faber, 1978, p. 3) Eliot's other works include poetic dramas, in which his dramatic verse became gradually indistinguishable from prose. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) was written for a church performance and treated the martyrdom of St. Thomas à Beckett. After the publication of the play, Eliot was appointed to the committee in charge of a new English translation of the Bible. In The Family Reunion (1939) Eliot took a theme of contemporary life, and tried to find a rhythm close to contemporary speech. The Coctail Party (1950) was partly based on Alcestis of Euripides. Eliot's most influential exercise in social criticism was Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948). What we have to do is to bring poetry into the world in which the audience lives and to which it returns when it leaves the theatre; not to transport the audience into some imaginary world totally unlike its own, an unreal world in which poetry is tolerated. What I should hope might be achieved, by a generation of dramatists having the benefit of our experience, is that the audience should find, at the moment of awareness that it is hearing poetry, that it is saying to itself: 'I could talk in poetry too!' Then we should not be transported into an artificial world; on the contrary, our own sordid, dreary daily world would be suddenly illuminated and transfigured. (from Poetry and Drama, The Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture, Harvard University, November 21, 1950, Faber & Faber, 1951, p. 27) Eliot
was an incurable joker and among his many pranks was to
seat
visiting authors in chairs with whoopee cushions and offer them
exploding cigars. To the poet's pleasure, the American comedian Groucho
Marx was his great fan. "The picture of
you," Eliot wrote in 1964 to Groucho on the eve of Groucho's visit to
London, "in the newspaper saying that . . . you have come
to London to see me has greatly enhanced my credit in the
neighbourhood, and particularly with the greengrocer across the
street. Obviously I am now someone of importance." (Groucho Marx: The Comedy of Existence by Lee Siegel, Yale University Press, 2015, p. 20) The two had a dinner at the Eliots'
house, and perhaps realized that they could never be true friends. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939),
a book of verse for children, consists of 15 narrative poems of cats;
in the first edition there were 14 poems. The extra piece, 'Cat Morgan
Introduces Himself', was added to the unillustrated edition in 1953.
"The
naming of cats
is a difficult matter," Eliot wrote. His own cats included Pettpaws,
Wiscus and George Pushdragon – he was fond of unusual names. Vivien
Eliot had a yorkshire terrier,
Polly; "a Dog is, on the whole / What you would call a simple soul,"
Eliot said. His own nickname among his friends, invented by Ezra
Pound, was "Possum," because he was very reserved and seemed to "play
dead" in painful social situations. Pound took the name from Chandler
Harris' Uncle Remus stories
(1881-1907). Readers of The Waste
Land did not expect Eliot to produce a book of rhymed fables,
but from the first edition Old
Possum's Book sold well and reviews were overall positive. Some critics were embarrassed; John Holmes of the Boston Evening Transcript expressed
doubt that Eliot had "the right to publish a playful book about cats,
or a book playful about anything". (T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide
by David E. Chinitz, 2003, p. 179) About four decades later, in the 1980s, Eliot's work achieved a considerable world success in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical adaptation, which premiered at the New London theatre on 11 May 1981. Tom Hooper's movie version of Webber's Cats from 2019 received poor reviews. ". . . is Cats the kinkiest film to earn a U certificate?" asked Catherine Shoard. (The Guardian, 19 December 2019) For Thine is This is the way the world ends Eliot died in London on January 4, 1965. His ashes were taken to St Michael's Church in East Coker, his ancestral village. Eliot's fame has been shadowed by accusations of racism, misogynism, fascism, emotional coldness, and anti-Semitism. "I am sick of doing business with Jew publishers who will not carry out their part of the contract unless they are forced to," Eliot said in one of his outbursts. (from a letter to John Quinn, 12 March 1923, The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 2: 1923-1925, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, Faber and Faber, 2011) However, Eliot avoided being labelled as a Communist. Some hints of Eliot's anti-Semitism, especially the poem 'Burbank With a Baedeker: Bleistein With a Cigar,' have been linked to his theology, but racial prejudices weere never the center of his thought. The possibility that Eliot perhaps was parodying antisemitism has also been offered as an explanation of this controversial poem. (T. S. Eliot's Bleistein Poems: Uses of Literary Allusion in "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" and "Dirge" by Patricia Sloane, International Scholars Publications, 2000) For further reading: The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot, and the Role of a Lifetime by Sara Fitzgerald (2024); Desire and the Ascetic Ideal: Buddhism and Hinduism in the Works of T.S. Eliot by Edward Upton (2023); Mary and Mr. Eliot: A Sort of Love Story by Mary Trevelyan and Erica Wagner (2023); T.S. Eliot's Ariel Poems: Making Sense of the Times by Anna Budziak (2022); Eliot After "The Waste Land" by Robert Crawford (2022); Young Eliot: From St. Louis to "The Waste Land" by Robert Crawford (2015); T. S. Eliot and Christian Tradition, ed. by Benjamin G. Lockerd (2014); Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot by Carole Seymour-Jones (2001); T.S. Eliot's Bleistein Poems: Uses of Literary Allusion in "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" and "Dirge" by Patricia Sloane (2000); Words Alone by Dennis Donoghue (2000); Eliot's Dark Angel by Ronald Schuchard (1999); Guide to the Secular Poetry of T.S. Eliot by Susan E. Blalock (1996); A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot by B.C. Southam (1996); The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and the Occult by Leon Surette (1993); T.S. Eliot: A Life by P. Acroyd (1985); T.S. Eliot: The Critic as Philosopher by L. Freed (1979); The Composition of Four Quarters by Helen Gardner (1978); T.S. Eliot by B. Bergonzi (1973); T.S. Eliot: Poet and Dramatist by J. Chiari (1973); T.S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. by A. Tate (1967); T.S.Eliot's Dramatic Theory and Practice by C.H. Smith (1963); T.S. Eliot's Poetry and and Plays by G. Smith (1956); T.S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry by E. Drew (1949); The Achievement of T.S. Eliot by F.O. Matthiessen (1935) - Note: Film Tom and Viv (1994), directed by Brian Gilbert, based on the plays by Michael Hastings and starring Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson, chronicled the details of Eliot's marriage to socialite Vivien Haigh-Wood. Selected bibliography:
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