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)
