Eliot, T. S.

Eliot, T. S., ( Thomas Stearns Eliot) (1888–1965), a major figure in English literature since the 1920s. He was born at St Louis, Missouri, and educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Merton College, Oxford. In 1914 he met Pound, who encouraged him to settle in England. In 1915 his poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ appeared in Poetry. Eliot began to work for Lloyds Bank in 1917 when he also became assistant editor of The Egoist. His first volume of verse, Prufock and other Observations (1917), was followed by Poems (1919), hand-printed by L. and V. Woolf at the Hogarth Press; these struck a new note in modern poetry, satiric, allusive, cosmopolitan, at times lyric and elegiac. In 1922 Eliot founded a new quarterly, The Criterion; in the first issue appeared, with much éclat, The Waste Land, which established him decisively as the voice of a disillusioned generation. In 1925 he left Lloyds and became a director of Faber and Faber, where he built up a list of poets (Auden, G. Barker, Pound, Spender, etc.; see also Faber Book of Modern Verse) which represented the mainstream of the modern movement in poetry in England: from this time he was regarded as a figure of great cultural authority, whose influence was more or less inescapable.

In 1927 he became a British subject and a member of the Anglican church; his pilgrimage towards his own particular brand of High Anglicanism may be charted in his poetry through ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), with its broken asseverations of faith, through ‘The Journey of the Magi’ (1927) and ‘Ash-Wednesday’ (1930), to its culminating vision in Four Quartets (1935–42). His prose also shows the same movement; for example, in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) he describes himself as ‘classical in literature, Royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’. The same preoccupation with tradition continued to express itself in his critical works, and developed in part from the concept of ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which he had formulated in 1921. (See Hulme, whose views influenced Eliot.)

In the 1930s Eliot began his attempt to revive poetic drama. Sweeney Agonistes (1932), an ‘Aristophanic fragment’ which gives, in syncopated rhythms, a satiric impression of the sterility of proletarian life, was followed by a pageant play, The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), and three ‘comedies’: The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959). Eliot's classic book of verse for children, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), reveals the aspect of his character that claimed the influence of Lear.

Eliot was equally influential as critic and poet, and in his combination of literary and social criticism may be called the M. Arnold of the 20th cent. Among his critical works may be mentioned: The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920) (which contains the essay on Hamlet, coining the phrase ‘objective correlative’); The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933); Elizabethan Essays (1934); The Idea of a Christian Society (1940); Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948); Poetry and Drama (1951); On Poetry and Poets (1957). Leavis, himself much influenced by Eliot, has pointed out the vital connections between Eliot's creative work and critical attitude (in, e.g., his revaluation of Donne, Marvell, Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama, Milton, Dryden, and his praise of Dante, Laforgue, and the French Symbolists). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and the Order of Merit in 1948.