T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-born English poet, literary critic, dramatist, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, who is best known for his poem The Waste Land, one of the most widely discussed and influential literary works of the early 20th century. His plays, which rely on a colloquial use of unrhymed verse, attempted to revive poetic drama for the contemporary audience. Eliot's methods of literary analysis have been a major influence on English and American critical writing. According to the influential Canadian critic Northrop Frye: “A thorough knowledge of Eliot is compulsory for anyone interested in contemporary literature. Whether he is liked or disliked is of no importance, but he must be read.”

Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, into a distinguished New England family. His father was a businessman and his grandfather a Unitarian minister. His mother was a poet. He was educated at Harvard University, the Sorbonne, and the University of Oxford. He became a resident of London in 1915 and a naturalized British citizen in 1927. Between 1915 and 1919 he worked at various positions, including those of teacher, bank clerk, and as assistant editor of the literary magazine The Egoist. In 1915 he married Vivien Haigh-Wood, but the marriage was not a happy one and they separated in 1932-1933. Vivien died in 1947 and in 1957 Eliot married Valerie Fletcher.

Eliot's first collection of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), contains poems written in free verse and makes much use of the imagery of modern, cosmopolitan urban life: “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo. / The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes / Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening” (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”). Such contemporary language and imagery was still unusual in poetry of this period. Eliot's long poem in five parts, The Waste Land (1922), is an erudite work that expresses vividly his conception of the sterility of modern society in contrast with societies of the past. It became a landmark of Modernism (although Eliot later described it as “just a piece of rhythmical grumbling”).

During the 1920s Eliot developed his views on various literary, cultural, and religious subjects. His ideas about what he called the “objective correlative” and the “dissociation of sensibility” profoundly influenced literary criticism. In his collection of essays, The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot argued that the critic must develop a strong historical sense in order to judge literature from a proper perspective, and in a famous formulation in the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” he dictated that the poet must be impersonal in the exercise of his craft: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality”. He believed that “Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult”. In the collection of essays For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), he famously described his position as that of a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion. His other prose works include The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1948), and On Poetry and Poets (1957).

As founder and editor of the magazine The Criterion from 1922 to 1939, Eliot provided a literary forum for many prominent contemporary writers, and in 1925 he joined the publishing house Faber and Gwyer (later Faber & Faber) as an editor, where he built up a list of poets representing the modern movement in British poetry, including Thom Gunn and Philip Larkin.

During the 1930s new qualities of serenity and religious humility became apparent in Eliot's poetry, notably in Ash Wednesday (1930), The Rock (1934), and his long verse play, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), based on the martyrdom of St Thomas à Becket. Four Quartets (1943), considered by many critics his finest work, is influenced by the philosophy of F. H. Bradley and wrestles with great issues such as the meaning of time and redemption in a language rich with paradox: “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past.” The poem is full of questions and self-doubt: “Words strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, / Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, / Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, / Will not stay still.”

Eliot's fame as a playwright dates from the commercial success of The Cocktail Party (1949), a modern drawing-room comedy which explores the meaning of salvation. Eliot's other plays include Sweeney Agonistes (1932), The Family Reunion (1939), The Confidential Clerk (1953), and The Elder Statesman (1958), but he is perhaps now most familiar to the theatre-going public as the author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a book of verse for children which was adapted and made into the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats.

Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Order of Merit in 1948 and the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964. He died on January 4, 1965, and is buried at East Coker, the village in Somerset from where his ancestor Andrew Eliot had emigrated to America in the 17th century. The T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry is awarded annually in his honour.