T.S ELIOT

 T.S ELIOT

    Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. 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.

    After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.

    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 of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.

    As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century (most notably John Donne) and the nineteenth century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post–World War I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major later poetry collections include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933),

    After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.

    He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He died in London on January 4, 1965.Thomas Stearns “T.S.” Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, into a wealthy and culturally prominent family with roots in Boston and New England. His ancestors could trace their lineage back to the Pilgrim era, after leaving Somerset in the 1650s. He was raised to pursue the highest cultural ideals, and his lifelong obsession with literature can also be ascribed to the fact that he suffered from a congenital double inguinal hernia, which meant he could not participate in physical activities and thus, socialize with other children. Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer was an early favorite of his.

    Eliot entered Smith Academy in 1898, where he received a humanistic education that included the study of Latin, ancient Greek, German, and French. Upon completing his education at Smith in 1905, he attended Milton Academy for one year in Boston to prepare for his enrollment at Harvard University, where he stayed from 1906 to 1914. He spent his junior year abroad, mainly in Paris, where he studied French literature at the Sorbonne University and was exposed to the thoughts of philosopher Henri Bergson. After obtaining his bachelor’s degree in 1911, he proceeded with more thorough studies in philosophy through his master’s. During these years, he studied Sanskrit literature and philosophy and attended a lecture by philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was a visiting professor at Harvard in 1914. He impressed the philosopher to the point that he was mentioned in a letter from Bertrand Russell to lady Ottoline Morrell, who, in turn, became an important figure in Eliot’s life when he moved to England in the summer of 1914 for a fellowship at Merton College, Oxford.

    Eliot promptly escaped Oxford, as he found the university town atmosphere and crowds stifling. He moved to London and took rooms in Bloomsbury, and got acquainted with other writers and poets. Thanks to his Harvard friend Conrad Aiken, who had been in London the year before and had shown Eliot’s work around, people like Harold Munro, the owner of the Poetry

    Bookshop, and American writer Ezra Pound knew about him. A friend from Milton Academy, Scofield Thayer, introduced him to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a governess whom Eliot married after a three-month courtship. Thayer also published Eliot’s first great work The Waste Land, in 1922.

    Haigh-Wood suffered from physical and psychological ailments, and soon Eliot sought the company of others. She, in turn, embarked on a relationship with Russell. In those years, when World War I was raging on, T.S. Eliot had to work for a living, so he turned to teaching, which he was not fond of, and book reviewing. His writing appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The International Journal of Ethics, and The New Statesman. These early reviews contained ideas that he developed into larger and more significant essays later in life.

    In 1917, he started working for Lloyds Bank, what would become an eight-year-long career. Shortly after he joined Lloyds, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Observations, was published by the Egoist Press, under the control of Harriet Shaw Weaver, a patron of the avant-garde arts. Prufrock, the narrator or speaker of the poem, is a modern individual living a life of frustration and lamenting his lack of qualities. His meditations are presented in a style reminiscent of James Joyce’s stream of consciousness. Working at Lloyds provided him with a steady income, and his literary output increased in volume and significance. In these years he befriended Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and published his first collection of poetry, aptly titled Poems, with their Hogarth Press imprint—the American edition was published by Knopf. At the urging of Ezra Pound, he also became assistant editor at Egoist magazine.

    The post-World War I climate of uncertainty, coupled with his failing marriage, which led to his feeling of nervous exhaustion, led him to express fear and loathing of the contemporary social and economic scene. This served as a backdrop for the four-part poem, which he started drafting in 1920, He Do the Police in Different Voices, which then developed into The Waste Land. In the summer of 1921, with his poem still unfinished, he had two memorable aesthetic experiences: one was the awareness of the upcoming publication of Joyce’s Ulysses, which he praised for its “mythic method,” the usage of myth to make sense of the modern world; the other was attending a performance of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Rite of Spring, known for its primeval rhythm and dissonance, which juxtaposed the primitive and the contemporary.

    In the months prior to the publication of The Wasteland, he suffered from panic attacks and migraines, to the point that he managed to get a three-month leave from the bank and went to recuperate in Margate, located in the southeast coast of England, with his wife. At the urging of Lady Ottoline Morrell, by then a friend, he consulted Dr. Roger Vitoz, a specialist in nervous disorders, in Lausanne. This allowed him to compose the fifth part of the poem in a state of inspiration. He left his manuscript in the care of Ezra Pound, who excised about half of the lines of the original work and rechristened it The Waste Land. Pound had realized that the unifying element of Eliot’s poem was its mythic core. Back in London, he launched the Criterion, financed by Lady Rothermere. It debuted in October 1922, when he also published The Waste Land. One month later it was published in Sconfield Thayer’s magazine The Dial. Within a year of its publication, the poem had an enormous impact and, alongside Ulysses, it defined the characters and stylistic convention of modernist literature.