Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns)

Eliot, T[homas] S[tearns] (1888–1965), born in St. Louis, graduated from Harvard (1910) and studied at the Sorbonne and at Merton College, Oxford. For a year he was an instructor in philosophy at Harvard, and his first articles were on this subject. In 1914 he went to Europe, and he did not return to the U.S. until 1932, when he held a lectureship at Harvard. In the intervening years he did some schoolteaching in England, became a London bank clerk, wrote reviews and poems, assisted in editing a literary journal, and in 1923 became editor of the quarterly review Criterion. In 1927 he became a British subject because of his interest in the English church and state.

His first volume of criticism, The Sacred Wood (1920), emphasized the importance of tradition, both in creative writing and in criticism, and through further critical work he was partly responsible for a revival of interest in Donne and Dryden, in whom he found a fusion of thought and feeling that gave a unified sensibility to their poetry. For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) showed that in the Church of England he found the symbol and expression of meaningful form and discipline that he judged necessary to adequate fulfillment of his own life and service to letters. In After Strange Gods (1934), lectures delivered at the University of Virginia, he revealed his increasing preoccupation with tradition as it relates to the expression of moral problems in contemporary literature.

Not only was his poetry in harmony with his critical standards, but it also showed his understanding and skillful use of the works of earlier authors in the presentation of his ideas. His first volume of verse, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), had a tone of flippant despair, but he employed the rhythms and technique of ironic contrast of some of the French Symbolists in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and other poems. A second volume, Poems (1920), contained a brilliant series of quatrains, including Sweeney Among the Nightingales, Sweeney Erect, The Hippopotamus, and Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service, in which he further indicated that he felt life to be ignoble, sordid, or stultifying, while it had once been otherwise, using the figure of Sweeney, among others, to show this. In this volume he also displayed the inanition of modern life in “Gerontion,” and he reached the fullness of his poetic expression during this period of despair in The Waste Land (1922).

After The Hollow Men (1925), which indicated this trend, he issued Ash‐Wednesday (1930), and made clear his allegiance to the Church of England. In this context he wrote the dialogues and choruses of The Rock (1934), a pageant representing the past and present difficulties of the Church and its ultimate triumph, and Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a latter‐day morality play concerning the assassination of Thomas à Becket and affirming the value of the Church as a medium for social action. Later verse plays were The Family Reunion (1939), a drama of sin and expiation; two symbolic comedies on faith and the quest for personal identity, The Cocktail Party (1950) and The Confidential Clerk (1954); and The Elder Statesman (1958), about a distinguished old man who sees not only the nature of his youthful follies but his son's imitations of them. In 1943 he collected Four Quartets, poetic considerations of time and place, memory and consciousness. In 1948 he was awarded a Nobel Prize.

His poetry illustrated also two critical formulas expressed in his prose. In The Sacred Wood he declared, “The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative'; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion,” and in Tradition and the Individual Talent, an essay also from The Sacred Woods, he declared, “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.”

His other works include Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (1917); Ara Vos Prec (1919); Homage to John Dryden (1924); Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1927); The Journey of the Magi (1927); A Song for Simeon (1928); Dante (1929); Animula (1929); Marina (1930); Triumphal March (1931); John Dryden, the Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic (1932); The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), his Harvard lectures; Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939); The Idea of a Christian Society (1940); Notes Toward a Definition of Culture (1949); and On Poetry and Poets (1957). His Poems Written in Early Youth (1904–10) was privately issued in 1950 and for sale in 1967. The first volume of his Letters was published in 1988.