Meanwhile, he was also a prolific reviewer and essayist in both literary criticism and technical philosophy. He was somewhat self-deprecating and minimising of his work and once said his criticism was merely a "by-product" of his "private poetry-workshop", but the critic William Empson once said, "I do not know for certain how much of my own mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. Its reception in London can be gauged from an unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement on 21 June 1917. "[56], In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, Eliot was commemorated by the placement of a large stone in the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey. . In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. Burt, Steven and Lewin, Jennifer. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns. Bush, Ronald. Critic Poet . Eliot was a groundbreaking 20th-century poet who is known widely for his work 'The Waste Land.' From the appearance of Eliot’s first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917, one may conveniently date the maturity of the 20th-century poetic revolution. The poem’s style is highly complex, erudite, and allusive, and the poet provided notes and references to explain the work’s many quotations and allusions. More generally, New Critics took a cue from Eliot in regard to his "'classical' ideals and his religious thought; his attention to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century; his deprecation of the Romantics, especially Shelley; his proposition that good poems constitute 'not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence that 'poets... at present must be difficult'. [17], Eliot lived in St. Louis, Missouri for the first 16 years of his life at the house on Locust St. where he was born. "The Voice of This Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T. S. Eliot", Bush, Ronald, 'The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/ Literary Politics'. From this background, the Quartets end with an affirmation of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well. Last Updated on May 5, 2015, by eNotes Editorial. Some scholars have suggested that she and Russell had an affair, but the allegations were never confirmed.[29]. T.S. Updates? Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. T.S. On a trip to Paris in August 1920 with the artist Wyndham Lewis, he met the writer James Joyce. Thomas Stearns Eliot, better known as T.S. Biography TS Eliot was arguably the 20th century's most important poet. Eliot's style of writing in "Ash-Wednesday" showed a marked shift from the poetry he had written prior to his 1927 conversion, and his post-conversion style continued in a similar vein. From then on, he updated this work as Collected Poems. On 10 January 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd comments that "for [Eliot], Murder in the Cathedral and succeeding verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to practice poetry but it also offered a convenient home for his religious sensibility. He had argued that a poet must write "programmatic criticism", that is, a poet should write to advance his own interests rather than to advance "historical scholarship". In 1954, the composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems for speaker and orchestra in a work titled Practical Cats. "[57], The apartment block where he died, No. [20] The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken, the American writer and critic. John Worthen's "short biography" of T.S. "The Hollow Men" appeared in 1925. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of [Ezra] Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. [72] The "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" that is so characteristic of his mythical method remained in fine form. Eliot - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). The men who influenced him at Harvard were George Santayana, the philosopher and poet, and the critic Irving Babbitt. [39][40] About 30 years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament". They were married at Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915. It was defeated by two votes after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture.[23]. The Waste Land is not Eliot’s greatest poem, though it is his most famous. [3][25], Before leaving the US, Eliot had told Emily Hale that he was in love with her; he exchanged letters with her from Oxford during 1914 and 1915 but they did not meet again until 1927. "[27] Less than four months later, Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess. Name at birth: Thomas Stearns Eliot. Post-war Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, Eliot's failed marriage.[71]. Brand, Clinton A. Eliot was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor. [3] He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). This is the ultimate theme of The Waste Land, concretized by the poem’s constant rhetorical shifts and its juxtapositions of contrasting styles. The first, or programmatic, phase of Eliot’s criticism ended with The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)—his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. Eliot's reputation as a poet, as well as his influence in the academy, peaked following the publication of The Four Quartets. After Eliot's death, the book was adapted as the basis of the musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber, first produced in London's West End in 1981 and opening on Broadway the following year.[76]. [95] And the writers of Time magazine were similarly baffled by a challenging poem like The Waste Land. These honours are displayed in order of precedence based on Eliot's nationality and rules of protocol, not awarding date. He spent the year 1910–11 in France, attending Henri Bergson’s lectures in philosophy at the Sorbonne and reading poetry with Alain-Fournier. Cleo McNelly Kearns notes in her biography that Eliot was deeply influenced by Indic traditions, notably the Upanishads. "[104] Another well-known example appears in the poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar". He was born into a distinguished family. He was intrigued by the book ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.’ In 1898, T. S.Eliot joined S… He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry". The revised edition of Lyndall Gordon’s biography (2012) is a comprehensive account of Eliot’s life, dealing mainly with his life in England, and including five appendices plus a profusion of Notes. The Eliots were a Boston Brahmin family with roots in England and New England. [43] From 1933 to 1946 Eliot had a close emotional relationship with Emily Hale. He himself wrote in his 1940 essay on W.B. Biography of T. S. Eliot and a searchable collection of works. Below is a partial list of honours and awards received by Eliot or bestowed or created in his honour. "[36] After this, he worked on more "commercial" plays for more general audiences: The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk, (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958) (the latter three were produced by Henry Sherek and directed by E. Martin Browne[80]). T. S. Eliot is not the sort of poet you can understand in isolation. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is the most famous English poem of the 20th century, a landmark meditation on … [However] his range as a poet [was] limited, and his interest in the great middle ground of human experience (as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner) [was] deficient." Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. He was born to Henry Ware Eliot who was an industrialist and philanthropist and Charlotte Champe Stearns who was a school teacher and poet. "Poetry and the New Criticism". Eliot grew up within th… Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poem The Waste Land.[85]. The stone, cut by designer Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates, his Order of Merit, and a quotation from his poem Little Gidding, "the communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living. [13] He also published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London. [34][35] At Faber and Faber, he was responsible for publishing important English poets like W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Ted Hughes. T.S. One: the Church of England offered Eliot some hope for himself, and I think Eliot needed some resting place. This page was last edited on 10 January 2021, at 16:54. T. S. Eliot Biography: Back to Poet Page: Enlarge Picture: Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended to Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". This change seems to him to consist in a loss of the union of thought and feeling. T. S. Eliot. After Eliot's death, Valerie dedicated her time to preserving his legacy, by editing and annotating The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land. He also wrote plays and some important essays about literature. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In my end is my beginning. By 1916, he had completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on "Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley", but he failed to return for the viva voce exam. The Waste Land expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust of the period after World War I. [60], During an interview in 1959, Eliot said of his nationality and its role in his work: "I'd say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. His style became less ironic, and the poems were no longer populated by multiple characters in dialogue. He married an intellectual New Englander, Charlotte Champ. ", "Little Gidding" (the element of fire) is the most anthologised of the Quartets. He was aware of this even early in his career. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. "[23] Escaping Oxford, Eliot spent much of his time in London. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including "The Waste Land" (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 to a family with prominent New England heritage. [14][15][16] Such a link with Indigenous peoples importantly antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard. After having six children, she turned her energies to education and legal safeguards for the young. Biographical T homas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. In the academic year 1909–10 he was an assistant in philosophy at Harvard. Eliot Biography Biography "An age which reads in a hurry and likes to understand familiar meanings with headline speed has accused [T.S.] Each has five sections. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. This case has been presented most forcefully in a study by Anthony Julius: T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996). Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot was born onSeptember 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. Eliot said he found Joyce arrogant—Joyce doubted Eliot's ability as a poet at the time—but the two soon became friends, with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever he was in Paris. "[70] It is Eliot's major poem of the late 1920s. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Henri Alban-Fournier. Whereas Wordsworth thought he was going back to the “real language of men,” Eliot struggled to create new verse rhythms based on the rhythms of contemporary speech. Omissions? "Ash-Wednesday" is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American-born, British, poet, essayist, playwright, critic, now regarded as one of the twentieth century’s major poets. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), Plaque on interior wall of Saint Stephen's, Specific quote is "The general point of view [of the essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [, Eliot, T. S. "Letter to J. H. Woods, April 21, 1919.". I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention"[68], The poem is known for its obscure nature—its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book Les amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot's life. "[105] Interpreting the line as an indirect comparison of Jews to rats, Julius writes: "The anti-Semitism is unmistakable. Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. "[87], Eliot's essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. In 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck, University of London. quoted in Roger Kimball, "A Craving for Reality". T.S. In an essay on Eliot published in 1989, the writer Cynthia Ozick refers to this peak of influence (from the 1940s through the early 1960s) as "the Age of Eliot" when Eliot "seemed pure zenith, a colossus, nothing less than a permanent luminary, fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon". [73] "The Hollow Men" contains some of Eliot's most famous lines, notably its conclusion: This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper. Eliot had no children with either of his wives. He would like to be something of a popular entertainer and be able to think his own thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask. [3][20] From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. On September 26, 1888, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, a member of the third generation of a New England family that had come to St. Louis in 1834. [Conrad] Aiken, for example, marveled at 'how sharp and complete and sui generis the whole thing was, from the outset. After having six children, she turned her energies to education and legal safeguards for the young. Eliot is shorter than most biographies, but that does not mean that it is an ideal biography for the general reader who is looking for an introduction to the man and his poetry. Louis. [55] A wall plaque in the church commemorates him with a quotation from his poem East Coker: "In my beginning is my end. [3][21] Whilst a member of the Harvard Graduate School, Eliot met and fell in love with Emily Hale. T S Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. The philosopher Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Nevertheless, he concluded, "Ultimately, as both Raine and, to do him justice, Julius insist, however much Eliot may have been compromised as a person, as we all are in our several ways, his greatness as a poet remains. Eliot later destroyed Hale's letters to him, but Hale donated Eliot's to Princeton University Library where they were sealed until 2020. T.S. in 1909, after three instead of the usual four years. [63] Although the character Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only twenty-two. The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration of the Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Ring in the new year with a Britannica Membership. Eliot wrote The Cocktail Party while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study. When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge, in 1965. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. By comparison, the narrator concludes that "Love is itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of movement, / Timeless, and undesiring. He moved from his native United States to England in 1914 at the age of 25, settling, working, and marrying there. [41] He also had wider spiritual interests, commenting that "I see the path of progress for modern man in his occupation with his own self, with his inner being" and citing Goethe and Rudolf Steiner as exemplars of such a direction. This city had a monumental and life-altering effect on Eliot for several reasons, the most significant of which was his introduction to the influential American literary figure Ezra Pound. The Sanskrit mantra ends the poem. The marriage was markedly unhappy, in part because of Vivienne's health problems. Sexual encounter at the start of The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock. He was born Thomas Stearns Eliot into the bosom of a respectable middle class family on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. Although they resist easy characterisation, each poem includes meditations on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation to the human condition. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. Eliot, in full Thomas Stearns Eliot, (born September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died January 4, 1965, London, England), American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). After going away to school in 1905, he only returned to St. Louis for vacations and visits. ", "The Dry Salvages" treats the element of water, via images of river and sea. Craig Raine, in his books In Defence of T. S. Eliot (2001) and T. S. Eliot (2006), sought to defend Eliot from the charge of anti-Semitism. [102][103] In "Gerontion", Eliot writes, in the voice of the poem's elderly narrator, "And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner [of my building] / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp. The Waste Land is a poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. From the Sanskrit ending of The Waste Land to the "What Krishna meant" section of Four Quartets shows how much Indic religions and more specifically Hinduism made up his philosophical basic for his thought process. The play featured "Sweeney", a character who had appeared in a number of his poems. It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good; putting it as modestly as I can, it wouldn't be what it is if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. "[67] The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. One project he had in mind was writing a play in verse, using some of the rhythms of early jazz. The poet writing in English may therefore make his own tradition by using materials from any past period, in any language. The phrase has been attacked, yet the historical fact that gave rise to it cannot be denied, and with the poetry of Eliot and Pound it had a strong influence in reviving interest in certain 17th-century poets. [22] Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. He writes, "Sometimes regarded as too academic (William Carlos Williams's view), Eliot was also frequently criticized for a deadening neoclassicism (as he himself—perhaps just as unfairly—had criticized Milton). However, the multifarious tributes from practicing poets of many schools published during his centenary in 1988 was a strong indication of the intimidating continued presence of his poetic voice. By 1916 he had finished a dissertation, but he never took the final oral examination for the Ph.D. degree. Consciously intended or not, Eliot’s criticism created an atmosphere in which his own poetry could be better understood and appreciated than if it had to appear in a literary milieu dominated by the standards of the preceding age. "[2] Some critics, like Edmund Wilson, Conrad Aiken, and Gilbert Seldes thought it was the best poetry being written in the English language while others thought it was esoteric and wilfully difficult. [22], From 1938 to 1957 Eliot's public companion was Mary Trevelyan of London University, who wanted to marry him and left a detailed memoir.[45][46][47]. A Very Short Biography of T. S. Eliot An introduction to T. S. Eliot’s life and work We could write thousands of words as part of a T. S. Eliot biography, but instead we’ll limit ourselves to a reasonably short piece that distils all of the most interesting aspects of Eliot’s life … He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind. In regard to The Waste Land, Wilson admits its flaws ("its lack of structural unity"), but concluded, "I doubt whether there is a single other poem of equal length by a contemporary American which displays so high and so varied a mastery of English verse. Yeats: "The kind of poetry that I needed to teach me the use of my own voice did not exist in English at all; it was only to be found in French." . Eliot’s second famous phrase appears here—“dissociation of sensibility,” invented to explain the change that came over English poetry after Donne and Andrew Marvell. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."[31]. [74], Many critics were particularly enthusiastic about "Ash-Wednesday". Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). The couple formally separated in 1933 and in 1938 Vivienne's brother, Maurice, had her committed to a mental hospital, against her will, where she remained until her death of heart disease in 1947. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event. Eliot", "The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the Significance of T. S. Eliot's Indic Studies", "Statement by T. S. Eliot on the opening of the Emily Hale letters at Princeton", "Sealed Treasure: T. S. Eliot Letters to Emily Hale", Books: Royalist, Classicist, Anglo-Catholic, "TS Eliot's hidden love letters reveal intense, heartbreaking affair", "Marriage. [110] The "new evangels"[110] of totalitarianism are presented as antithetic to the spirit of Christianity. [99] But during this post-war period, others, like Ronald Bush, observed that this time also marked the beginning of the decline in Eliot's literary influence: As Eliot's conservative religious and political convictions began to seem less congenial in the postwar world, other readers reacted with suspicion to his assertions of authority, obvious in Four Quartets and implicit in the earlier poetry. 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