BIOGRAPHY OF T.S.ELIOT

                                                     T.S. ELIOT

                                                         (1888-1965) 

INTRODUCTION

T.S. Eliot, the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the giants of modern literature, highly distinguished as a poet, literary critic, dramatist, and editor and publisher.

FAMILY

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri as a member of the third generation of a New England family that had come to St. Louis in 1834. Eliot's grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, Unitarian minister and founder of schools, a university, and charities. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a prosperous businessman and served the schools and charities his father had helped found. Eliot’s mother, Charlotte Champ was a teacher and a poet. After having six children, she focused her energy on writing.

EDUCATION 

Eliot lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis and then the Milton Academy in Massachusetts. In 1906 he went to Harvard University, majored in literature, earning a B.A. and an M.A. After graduating, Eliot served as a philosophy assistant at Harvard for a year, and then left for France and the Sorbonne to study philosophy. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but went to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and worked as a schoolmaster, a bank clerk, and eventually a literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director.

CONTRIBUTIONS

It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and except for the poem the title alludes to, the book contained little upon which Eliot’s reputation is now based. In 1919, Eliot published Poems and The Wasteland in 1922. It is considered the most influential poetic work of the 20th century.He edited the journal Criterion throughout the span of its publication (1922-1939). Ash-Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism and was published in 1930. In 1932 he published Selected Essays 1917-1932, a collection of his literary criticism through the 1920s. Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942).

 CRITIC

Eliot was almost as renowned a literary critic as he was a poet. From 1916 through 1921 he contributed approximately one hundred reviews and articles to various periodicals. Beginning in the late 1920s, Eliot’s literary criticism was supplemented by religious and social criticism. In 1919 two of his most influential pieces appeared. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and His Problems." Some of his early critical essays were The Sacred Wood (1920), Homage to John Dryden (1924), Selected Essays: 1917–1932 (1932), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) After Strange Gods (1934) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot served as literary editor of the Egoist, a feminist magazine, from 1917 to 1919. He was also writing anonymous reviews and essays for the London Times. 

His critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous works. His essay "Hamlet and His Problems" introduced the term "objective correlative", that suggests there can be a non-subjective judgment based on different readers' different interpretations of a work. Late in his career, Eliot focused much of his creative energy on writing for the theatre; some of his earlier critical writing, in essays such as "Poetry and Drama", "Hamlet and his Problems", and "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama", focused on the aesthetics of writing drama in verse.

For his vast influence in poetry, criticism and drama T.S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.He was a recipient of Hanseatic Goethe Prize (1955) Dante Medal (1959) and Thirteen Honorary Doctorates (from various universities).He had received Tony Award for Best Play in 1950, Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score  in 1983.

 After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. He died in London on January 4, 1965.

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Collected Poems (1962)   The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)   Four Quartets (1943) Burnt Norton (1941)     The Dry Salvages (1941)    Ash Wednesday (1930)    Poems, 1909–1925 (1925)     Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)     Poems (1919)    The Waste Land (1922)    Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)   East Coker (1940)        

                     

Prose

Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)    Poetry and Drama (1951)    The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)     Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)   Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)     Elizabethan Essays (1934)    The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)    John Dryden (1932)    The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)    Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)    The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)      After Strange Gods (1933)    Dante (1929)    For Lancelot Andrews (1928)   Andrew Marvell (1922)   The Sacred Wood (1920)   Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)

Drama

The Elder Statesman     The Confidential Clerk (1953)    The Rock (1934)      
The Cocktail Party (1950)      The Family Reunion (1939)
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)     Sweeney Agonistes (1932)