Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), American-English author, was one of the most influential poets writing in English in the 20th century, one of the most seminal critics, an interesting playwright, and an editor and publisher.

On Sept. 26, 1888, T. S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Mo., 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, a learned society, and charities, was the family patriarch. While carrying on a tradition of public service, the Eliots never forgot their New England ties. T. S. Eliot claimed that he was a child of both the Southwest and New England. In Massachusetts he missed Missouri's dark river, cardinal birds, and lush vegetation. In Missouri he missed the fir trees, song sparrows, red granite shores, and blue sea of Massachusetts.

Eliot Family

Henry Ware Eliot, the father of T. S. Eliot, became chairman of the board of a brick company and served the cultural institutions his father had helped found, as well as others. He married an intellectual New Englander, Charlotte Champ. After having six children, she turned her energies to education and legal safeguards for the young. She also wrote a biography, some religious poems, and a dramatic poem (1926), with a preface by her already widely respected youngest child, Thomas.

Eliot grew up within the family's tradition of service to religion, community, and education. Years later he declared, "Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any part of the world." The Eliots also spent summers on Cape Ann, Mass. These places appear in Eliot's early poetry, but in the Four Quartets of his maturity his affection for them is most explicit.

Education of a Poet

In St. Louis young Eliot received a classical education privately and at Smith Academy, originally named Eliot Academy. He composed and read the valedictory poem for his graduation in 1905. After a year at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, he went to Harvard in 1906. He was shy, correct in dress, and intellectually independent. He studied under such versatile men as William James, George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and Irving Babbitt. He discovered Dante and heard talk of reviving poetic drama. Among such student personalities as Walter Lippmann, Heywood Broun, Conrad Aiken, and E. E. Cummings, Eliot made a modest impression as a contributor and editor of the Harvard Advocate. He was quietly completing his bachelor of arts degree in 3 years and was hard on the track of a new poetic voice. In 1908 he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature, and through it the French poet Jules Laforgue. From the example of Laforgue, other French symbolists, and late Elizabethan dramatists, he began to develop the offhand eloquence, the pastiches and discordant juxta-positions, the rhythmic versatility, and the concern masked by evasive irony and wit that would soon dominate the American-British renascence in poetry.

Eliot's stay at Harvard to earn a master of arts in philosophy was interrupted by a year at the Sorbonne. He returned to Harvard in 1911 but in 1914 he went abroad again on a Harvard fellowship to study in Germany. When World War I broke out, he transferred to Merton College, Oxford, and studied with a disciple of F. H. Bradley, who became the subject of Eliot's dissertation. Ezra Pound, the young American poet, discovered Eliot at Oxford. Though they were quite different, they shared a devotion to learning and poetry. After Oxford, Eliot decided to stay in England and in 1915 married a vivacious Englishwoman, Vivienne Haigh Haigh-Wood. He taught at Highgate Junior School for boys near London (1915-1916) and then worked for Lloyd's Bank. While teaching, he completed his dissertation, Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. The dissertation was accepted, but Eliot did not return to America to defend it so as to receive his doctorate. His study of Bradley, however, contributed to his thought and prose style.

Early Poetry

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Eliot tried to join the U.S. Navy but was rejected for physical reasons. That year his first volume of verse, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared and almost immediately became the focus for discussion and controversy. Eliot's abruptly varied rhythms and his mixtures of precision and discontinuity, contemporary references and echoes of the past, and immediate experience and haunting leitmotifs spoke to the distraction and alienation that World War I had intensified in Western civilization. This quality was most effective in the ironically titled poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which the Victorian dramatic monologue is turned inward and wedded to witty disillusion and psychic privacies to present a dilettante character fearful of disturbing or being disturbed by anything in the universe. Prufrock moves through a dehumanized city of dispirited common men on an empty round of elegant but uncommunicative chitchat. The many voices within him, speaking in approximations of blank verse and in catchy couplets, contribute to what Hugh Kenner, the American critic, called an "eloquence of inadequacy."

Critic and Editor

As literary editor of the Egoist, a feminist magazine, from 1917 to 1919, Eliot began the editorial and critical careers that would continue until his death. The back pages of the Egoist were entrusted to a succession of young poet-editors, and here, with the aid of Ezra Pound, the new poetry and criticism got a hearing. Eliot was also writing anonymous reviews for the London Times and publishing essays that announced the appearance of a sometimes pontifical but illuminating critic. In 1919 two of his most influential pieces appeared. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" advocated the "depersonalization" of poetry and a redirection of interest away from the poet's personality to the poem, the process, and the tradition to which the poem belonged. "Hamlet and His Problems" defined "objective correlative," a term soon to achieve wide currency, as a particular object, act, sequence, or situation which the poet infuses with a particular feeling in order to be able to call it up economically by mere mention of the thing or event. In this essay Eliot demonstrated the need to cut through received opinion to the literary work itself. He declared that the "primary problem" in Hamlet is not the character but the play, because the character has to bear the burden of an "inexpressible" emotion "in excess of the facts as they appear."

In his early critical essays, collected as The Sacred Wood (1920), Homage to John Dryden (1924), Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (1932), and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot pointed to the poets, critics, and cultural figures who had been helpful to him and might assist others in adjusting 20th-century experience to literary and cultural tradition. Eliot was drawn to precision and concreteness in language, seeking "to purify the dialect of the tribe," as he later put it. He called attention to thematic or musical structure for communicating complex psychological experience, to past mergers of thought and feeling that could counteract the modern "dissociation of sensibility," and to the "mythical method" of James Joyce's novel Ulysses and of his own poetry—a method that contrasts the balance and sanity of masterpieces and the ages that produced them with the contemporary deracination that isolates individuals culturally and psychologically. With learned understatement he also assessed critics from Aristotle to his Harvard teacher Irving Babbitt. He found creative guides in 19th-century French symbolists; the 17th-century man of letters John Dryden and his predecessor John Donne; the Jacobean dramatists; and beyond them Dante, a bitter exile who created a serene masterpiece.

A rising poet and critic, Eliot made his way into elite British circles. The Bloomsbury group led by Leonard and Virginia Woolf welcomed him; as a somewhat British American, both conservative and liberal leaders could accept him; and young writers on both sides of the Atlantic offered respect and affection. When restless Pound left London for Paris in 1920, Eliot quietly assumed the leadership of England's young intelligentsia.

In "Gerontion" (1920) Eliot offered a shorter, less fragmented perspective on Prufrock's unfocused world, resorting again to the interior monologue, this time spoken by a despairing old man who did not believe or act passionately in youth and now regrets the spiritual waste of his life.

The Waste Land

While convalescing from exhaustion in 1921, Eliot advanced his diagnosis of war-enervated, spiritually moribund Europe with a draft of The Waste Land. This was to become, after publication in 1922, the most influential and controversial poem of the century. Eliot corresponded with Pound about the poem, and Pound's drastic editing compressed it, no doubt unifying and sharpening it. Eliot acknowledged Pound's help by dedicating the poem to him in Dante's words as "il miglior fabbro," the better maker.

In The Waste Land Eliot defines alienation and also indicates a remedy. Voices such as Prufrock's and Gerontion's are still heard, but Eliot's spokesman is now a mild Jeremiah, a lonely prophet or pilgrim who seeks spiritual regeneration in person and in thought throughout a corrupt city and across a disoriented continent. Spring is no longer the joyous season of renewal: "April is the cruelest month," for it calls unwilling people to physical and spiritual regeneration, to leave off unsacramental sex and materialistic busy-ness. Eliot had intensified and extended the varied rhythms and montages of his earlier interior monologues and now organized them in a five-part structure deriving from Beethoven's late quarters. While sordid and distracted images still abound, hopeful ones have increased, and a greater tension exists between the two. Social disintegration is equated with a shattered wasteland, but the poem's central consciousness is nevertheless alert to the possibility of recreating personal and communal wholes out of the present and the past, of fertility rites, Christianity, Indian philosophy, and Western literature and art: "These fragments I have shored against my ruin."

Also in 1922 Eliot founded the Criterion, an influential little magazine that appeared until 1939, when he discontinued its publication. In it he stressed learning, discipline, and the constant renewal of tradition in literature. The magazine also reflected his growing religiousness and his devotion to the idea of a culture stratified by class and unified by Christianity.

As author of The Waste Land and editor of the Criterion, Eliot assumed a dominant role in literature in America and in Great Britain. He left Lloyd's Bank in 1925 and joined Faber and Faber, Ltd., a publisher, eventually rising to a directorship there.

Meanwhile Eliot was crossing a divide in his career. He ended his preoccupation with one kind of alienation in "The Hollow Men" (1925), where the will-less subjects of the poem cluster in a dead land, waiting like effigies for a galvanic revelation that does not come. They comment on their lot in a spastic chorus that includes a children's game song, a fragment of the Lord's Prayer, and a parody of "world without end" and other expressions from the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.

"The Hollow Men," "Gerontion," and The Waste Land compose a triptych that delineates the estrangement of the self in a society fallen into secularism, with the central panel, The Waste Land, suggesting the possibility of salvaging the self by reconstituting culture out of its scattered parts.

Religious and Cultural Views

In 1927 Eliot became an Anglo-Catholic and a British citizen. With the heightened social consciousness of the worldwide economic depression, a reaction set in against his conservatism. It grew more difficult to explain away on literary grounds the anti-Semitic references in several of his poems. In After Strange Gods (1934) Eliot took the literary ideas of his "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and made them apply to culture. He also declared that too many freethinking Jews would be a detriment to the kind of organic Christian culture he proposed. This work, along with The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes toward a Definition of Culture (1948), indicated Eliot's stand against the pluralistic society of most Western democracies. Without a reconstruction of Christendom, the alternative, he felt, was paganism.

With Ash Wednesday (1930), while the literary tide was flowing Leftward, Eliot emerged as the sole orthodox Christian among important Anglo-American poets. The title of this six-part poem refers to the beginning of Lent, the most intense season of penitence and self-denial in the Christian year. The poem's central consciousness is an aging penitent closer to the convert Eliot than his spokesman in any previous major poem. Like his antecedents, the penitent is alienated—but from God, not from society or nature; and following the precedents of Dante and St. John of the Cross, the 16th-century Spanish mystic, he sets out to draw near the divine presence. The poem is his interior monologue narrating his progress and praying for guidance. The tone of unbroken sincerity and passionate yearning, of anxiety and some joy is new for Eliot. The penitent desires to abandon ambition, his fading powers of expression, the enticements of the world, and all that may prevent his mounting the turning stairs toward salvation. Though his longing for the vision of God known in childhood is not fulfilled, he progresses toward it, and he will persist. American critic F. O. Matthiessen remarked how Eliot with "paradoxical precision in vagueness" used wonderfully concrete images to convey the mystery of a spiritual experience.

In 1934 Eliot published After Strange Gods and also brought his religious and dramatic interests together in The Rock. This pageant mingles narrative prose with poetic dialogue and choruses as part of a campaign to raise funds to restore London's churches. Eliot's speakers ask for visible gathering places, where the "Invisible Light" can do its work.

In 1935 Murder in the Cathedral, perhaps Eliot's best play, was produced at Canterbury Cathedral. It has to do with Archbishop Thomas Becket, who was assassinated before the altar there in 1170. Its theme is the historical competition between church and state for the allegiance of the individual. Its poetry suggests blank verse with deviations. Becket prepares, like the penitent in Ash Wednesday, to accept God's will, knowing that "humanity cannot bear much reality." After his death, the chorus, speaking for humanity, confesses that "in life there is not time to grieve long," even for a martyr.

Four Quartets

In 1936 Eliot concluded his Poems 1909-1935 with "Burnt Norton," the first of what became the Four Quartets, an extended work that proved to be his poetic viaticum. "Burnt Norton," in which Eliot makes vivid use of his recurring rose-garden symbolism, grew out of a visit to a deserted Gloucestershire mansion. This poem engendered three others, each associated with a place. "East Coker" (1940) is set in the village of Eliot's Massachusetts ancestors. The last two quartets appeared with the publication of Four Quartets (1943). The third, "The Dry Salvages," named for three small islands off the Massachusetts coast where Eliot vacationed in his youth, draws on his American experiences; and the fourth, "Little Gidding," derives from a visit to the site of a religious community, now an Anglican shrine, where the British king Charles I paused before he surrendered and went to his death. Here Eliot asks forgiveness for a lifetime of mistakes, which no doubt includes his possible anti-Semitism of the years before the war. Each of the quartets is a separate whole but related to the others. All employ the thematic structure of music and the five movements of The Waste Land. The theme, developed differently, is the same in each: a penitential Eliot seeks the eternal in and through the temporal, the still dynamic center of the turning world. One may seek or wait in any place at any time, for God is in all places at all times. The theme and method continue those of Ash Wednesday, but the feeling in Four Quartets is less passionately personal, more compassionate and reconciled. The verse is serene, poised, and sparsely graceful.

Midway in his composition of Four Quartets, Eliot published Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). Here Eliot the fabulist appeared, and the humorist and wit resurfaced.

The Playwright

The Family Reunion, the first of Eliot's four plays for the professional stage, appeared in 1939. He later observed that its hero was a prig but its poetry the best in any of his plays. This play, like the other three, employs the familiar conventions of drawing-room comedy to encase religious matters. The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party (1940) both involve analogs with classical Greek dramas. The Confidential Clerk (1954) and The Elder Statesman (1959) even employ potentially melodramatic situations, although they are not developed popularly, for Eliot is preoccupied with individual religiousness and the self-revelations and mutual understandings it effects within families. In fact, The Elder Statesman, the last and simplest of his plays, contending that true love is beyond verbal expression, is dedicated to his second wife, Valerie.

The most successful of these plays, The Cocktail Party, enjoyed respectable runs and revivals in London and New York. It puts the tension between the temporal and the eternal in more effective dramatic terms than do the other plays. By means of the familiar, a cocktail party, Eliot involves the audience in the unbelievable, a modern martyrdom. He contrasts lives oriented to the natural with that of a martyred missionary devoted to the supernatural. At the same time he parallels a Greek drama more subtly than he did in The Family Reunion.

Eliot's drawing-room plays, however, have only a limited appeal. The poetry in the last three is unobtrusively effective, carried by voices moving naturally along the hazy border between poetry and prose. They are not so much powerful plays as suggestive ones.

Honor and Old Age

Following World War II there were important changes in Eliot's life and literary activities. In 1947 his first wife died. Suffering from nervous debilities, she had been institutionalized for years, and Eliot had visited her every Sunday and kept his suffering and deprivation private. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize and the British Order of Merit, and the list of his honors continued to grow. Publishing no important poetry after the Four Quartets, he devoted himself to the poetic drama, the revitalization of culture, some new criticism in On Poetry and Poets (1957), the readjustment of earlier critical judgments, and the editing of collections of his poetry and plays. In 1957 he married his private secretary, Valerie Fischer, and enjoyed a felicitous marriage until he died on Jan. 4, 1965, in London. In accordance with earlier arrangements his ashes were deposited in St. Michael's Church, East Coker, his ancestral village, on April 17, 1965.

Many poets and artists paid final tribute to Eliot, including Pound: "A grand poet and brotherly friend"; W. H. Auden: "A great poet and a great man"; Allen Tate: "Mr. Eliot was the greatest poet in English of the 20th century"; Robert Lowell: "He was a dear personal friend. Our American literature has had no greater poet or critic"; Robert Penn Warren: "He is the key figure of our century in America and England, the most powerful single influence." Avowedly Christian in a secular age, Eliot tried to revitalize the religious roots of Western culture. His career recalls the versatile man of letters of the 18th century.

Further Reading

An edition of Eliot's work is The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (1969). Donald C. Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (1952), lists Eliot's writings through 1951.

The literature on Eliot is extensive. Herbert Howarth, Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot (1964), provides biographical information. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (1959), is probably the standard work on Eliot. Francis O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935; 3d ed. 1958), provides a balanced introduction. Russell H. Robbins, The T. S. Eliot Myth (1951), primarily because of Eliot's conservatism, offers a negative view. Other studies include Elizabeth A. Drew, T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (1949); Helen L. Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot (1949); and D. E. S. Maxwell, The Poetry of T. S. Eliot (1952). George Williamson, A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis (1953; 2d ed. 1966), is a helpful reference work.

Collections of critical estimates of Eliot are Balachandra Rajan, ed., T. S. Eliot: A Study of His Writings by Several Hands (1947); Richard March and M. J. Tambimuttu, eds., T. S. Eliot: A Symposium (1948); Leonard Unger, ed., T. S. Eliot: A Selected Critique (1948); and Neville Braybrooke, ed., T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for His Seventieth Birthday (1958). Studies of particular works include Raymond Preston, " Four Quarters" Rehearsed (1946), and Robert E. Knoll, ed., Storm over the Waste Land (1964). □

T. S. Eliot

Born: September 26, 1888
St. Louis, Missouri
Died: January 4, 1965
London, England
American-born English author, poet, critic, playwright, editor, and publisher

T. S. Eliot, American-English author, was one of the most significant poets writing in English in the twentieth century, as well as one of the most influential critics, an interesting playwright, editor, and publisher.

Eliot's youth

On September 26, 1888, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, 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, was the family patriarch, or leader. While carrying on a tradition of public service, the Eliots never forgot their New England ties. T. S. Eliot claimed that he was a child of both the Southwest and New England. In Massachusetts he missed Missouri's dark river, cardinal birds, and lush vegetation. In Missouri he missed the fir trees, song sparrows, red granite shores, and blue sea of Massachusetts.

Eliot family

Henry Ware Eliot, the father of T. S. Eliot, became chairman of the board of a brick company and served the schools and charities his father had helped found, as well as others. He married a New Englander, Charlotte Champ. After having six children, she focused her energy on education and legal protection for the young. She also wrote a biography, some religious poems, and a dramatic poem (1926).

Eliot grew up within the family's tradition of service to religion, community, and education. Years later he declared, "Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any part of the world." The Eliots spent summers on Cape Ann, Massachusetts.

Education of a poet

In St. Louis young Eliot received a classical education privately and at Smith Academy, originally named Eliot Academy. He composed and read the valedictory (something that involves a farewell) poem for his graduation in 1905. After a year at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, he went to Harvard University in 1906. Eliot was shy and independent and he made a good impression as a contributor and editor of the Harvard Advocate. He completed his bachelor of arts degree in three years.

Eliot's stay at Harvard to earn a master of arts in philosophy (the study of knowledge) was interrupted by a year at the Sorbonne (The University of Paris) in Paris, France. He returned to Harvard in 1911 but in 1914 he went overseas again on a Harvard scholarship to study in Germany. When World War I (1914–18; a war fought between the German-led Central powers and the Allies: England, the United States, and France, among other nations) broke out, he transferred to Merton College, Oxford. Ezra Pound (1885–1972), the young American poet, discovered Eliot at Oxford. They shared a commitment to learning and poetry. After Oxford, Eliot decided to stay in England and in 1915 married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. He taught at Highgate Junior School for boys near London (1915–1916) and then worked for Lloyd's Bank. While teaching, he completed his dissertation (a writing on a subject that is required for a doctorate degree), Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. The dissertation was accepted, but Eliot did not return to the United States to defend it and therefore did not receive his doctorate.

Early poetry

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Eliot tried to join the U.S. Navy but was rejected for physical reasons. That year his first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared and almost immediately became the focus for discussion and debate. Eliot's writing style spoke to the confusion and bad feelings that World War I had created in European and American societies. This was most effective in the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Critic and editor

Eliot served as literary editor of the Egoist, a feminist (in support of equality for women) magazine, from 1917 to 1919. The back pages of the Egoist were written by a series of young poet-editors, and here, with the aid of Ezra Pound, the new poetry and commentary was written. Eliot was also writing anonymous (a work where no name is given to the creator) reviews for the London Times and publishing essays. 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), and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933).

The Waste Land

While recovering from exhaustion in 1921, Eliot wrote The Waste Land, one of the most influential and debated poems of the century. In The Waste Land, the weakening of society is compared with a shattered wasteland. The poem proposes solutions for recreating personal and caring communities through a variety of methods and with the joining of different religious beliefs.

Also in 1922 Eliot founded the Criterion, a small magazine that appeared until 1939. As author of The Waste Land and editor of the Criterion, Eliot assumed an important role in literature in America and in Great Britain. He left Lloyd's Bank in 1925 and joined Faber and Faber, Ltd., a publisher, eventually rising to a position of leadership there.

Religious and cultural views

In 1927 Eliot became an Anglo-Catholic and a British citizen. In After Strange Gods (1934) Eliot took the literary ideas of his "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and demonstrated how they could apply to society. He also declared that too many freethinking Jews would damage the kind of Christian culture he proposed. This work, along with The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes toward a Definition of Culture (1948), indicated Eliot's stand against the pluralistic society (a society that allows freedom of religion) of most Western democracies.

Ash Wednesday (1930) is the title of this six-part poem that refers to the beginning of Lent. The poem focuses on a person who is isolated from God and who sets out to find Him. The poem shows the prayer and progress of this person. The tone of sincerity and passionate yearning, of anxiety and some joy, was new for Eliot.

In 1934 Eliot published After Strange Gods and also brought his religious and dramatic interests together in The Rock. This display combines narrative prose (a story that is told in common, nonpoetic, language) with poetic dialogue (poetry written as though the poet were speaking).

In 1935 Murder in the Cathedral, perhaps Eliot's best play, was produced at Canterbury Cathedral. It has to do with Archbishop Thomas Becket (1118–1170), who was assassinated (killed for political reasons) before the altar there in 1170. The Family Reunion, the first of Eliot's four professional plays, appeared in 1939. This was followed by The Cocktail Party (1940), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959).

Four Quartets

In 1936 Eliot concluded his Poems 1909–1935 with "Burnt Norton," the first of what became the Four Quartets. "Burnt Norton," in which Eliot makes use of his repeated rose-garden symbolism, grew out of a visit to a deserted Gloucestershire mansion. This poem brought about three others, each associated with a place. "East Coker" (1940) is set in the village of Eliot's Massachusetts ancestors. The last two quartets appeared with the publication of Four Quartets (1943). The third, "The Dry Salvages," named for three small islands off the Massachusetts coast where Eliot vacationed in his youth; and the fourth, "Little Gidding," derives from a visit to the site of a religious community, where the British King Charles I (1600–1649) paused before he surrendered and went to his death. Each of the quartets is a separate whole that also is related to the others. The theme, developed differently, is the same in each: One may seek or wait in any place at any time, for God is in all places at all times.

Eliot, midway through his composition of Four Quartets, published Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). Here Eliot the fabulist (a writer of fables) appeared, and his humor and wit are demonstrated in this piece of work.

Honor and old age

In 1947 Eliot's first wife died. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize and the British Order of Merit, and the list of his honors continued to grow. After the Four Quartets, he committed himself to the poetic drama with On Poetry and Poets (1957), and the editing of collections of his poetry and plays. In 1957 Eliot married his private secretary, Valerie Fischer, and remained married until his death on January 4, 1965, in London. His ashes were placed in St. Michael's Church, East Coker, his ancestral village, on April 17, 1965.

Many poets and artists paid final tribute to T. S. Eliot, including Ezra Pound: "A grand poet and brotherly friend." A committed Christian in an important age, Eliot tried to restore the religious roots of European and American culture. His career recalls the flexible writer of the eighteenth century.

For More Information

Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Edited by Valerie Eliot. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 1999.

Howarth, Herbert. Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964.

Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1959.

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.

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.

T. S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot), 1888-1965, American-British poet and critic, b. St. Louis, Mo. One of the most distinguished literary figures of the 20th cent., T. S. Eliot won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature. He studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford. In 1914 he established residence in London and in 1927 became a British subject. After working as a teacher and a bank clerk he began a publishing career; he was assistant editor of the Egoist (1917-19) and edited his own quarterly, the Criterion (1922-39). In 1925 he was employed by the publishing house of Faber and Faber, eventually becoming one of its directors. His first marriage, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, was troubled, and ended with their separation in 1933. His subsequent marriage to Valerie Fletcher in 1957 was far more successful.

Eliot's early poetical works— Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land (1922)—express the anguish and barrenness of modern life and the isolation of the individual, particularly as reflected in the failure of love. The Waste Land, whose published version reflects extraordinary editing by Eliot's friend Ezra Pound , compelled immediate critical attention. His complex early poems, employing myths, religious symbolism, and literary allusion, signified a break with 19th-century poetic traditions. Their models were the metaphysical poets , Dante , the Jacobean dramatists, and French symbolists . Their meter ranged from the lyrical to the conversational. In his later poetry, notably Ash Wednesday (1930) and the Four Quartets (1935-42), Eliot turned from spiritual desolation to hope for human salvation. He accepted religious faith as a solution to the human dilemma and espoused Anglo-Catholicism in 1927.

Eliot was an extraordinarily influential critic, rejecting Romantic notions of unfettered originality and arguing for the impersonality of great art. His later criticism attempts to support Christian culture against what he saw as the empty and fragmented values of secularism. His outstanding critical works are contained in such volumes as The Sacred Wood (1920), For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Elizabethan Essays (1934), Essays Ancient and Modern (1936), and Notes towards a Definition of Culture (1948). Eliot's plays attempt to revitalize verse drama and usually treat the same themes as in his poetry. They include Murder in the Cathedral (1935), dealing with the final hours of Thomas à Becket ; The Family Reunion (1939); The Cocktail Party (1950); The Confidential Clerk (1954); and The Elder Statesman (1959). His complete poems and plays appeared in 1969, his letters in 1988, and his previously unpublished early poems (1909-17) in 1996.

Bibliography: See biographies by B. Bergonzi (1971), P. Ackroyd (1984), L. Gordon (rev. ed. 1999), and C. Raine (2006); studies by D. E. Jones (1960), E. M. Browne (1969), J. D. Margolis (1972), A. W. Litz (1973), E. Schneider (1975), C. Bedient (1987), J. Olney (1988), A. Julius (1996), and D. Donoghue (2000); bibliographies by D. Gallup (rev. ed. 1969) and B. Ricks (1980); biography of Vivienne Eliot (2002) by C. Seymour-Jones.

Eliot, T[homas] S[tearns] (1888–1965), playwright and poet. The expatriate American, who spent most of his creative career in England as a British subject, is remembered by American playgoers largely for three plays: Murder in the Cathedral (1936), The Cocktail Party (1950), and The Confidential Clerk (1954). None of the three was received in America with unequivocal acclaim. The merits of the poet's unique dramatic blank verse were open to serious question, the writing seen as verbose and elusive, and the plotting perceived as frequently too shaky. Nevertheless, all three works found reasonably large audiences and have been revived occasionally. Indirectly, Eliot may have been far more important to modern theatre in several ways. In his position as an arbiter of taste he was instrumental in promoting a reconsideration of long‐neglected Jacobean playwrights. His Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama is recognized as a precursor of the now popular style and approach of such later writers as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, and Sam Shepard. Lastly, his tremendous prestige made him a leading voice in the rebellion, however unsuccessful, against the reigning school of Ibsenite realism. His Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats provided some of the lyrics for the 1982 musical Cats.

Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888–1965), poet and dramatist, American by birth but English by adoption, who initiated a revival of poetic drama in England with a play on the murder of Thomas à Becket, Murder in the Cathedral (1935). First acted in the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral, it was subsequently revived several times with great success in commercial theatres in Britain and the United States. A later play, The Family Reunion (1939), based on the Oresteia of Aeschylus, was considered less successful, mainly because Eliot failed to integrate the ritualism of the chorus with the realism of the setting, but it has had occasional revivals. Of his last three plays, commissioned for performance at the Edinburgh Festival, The Cocktail Party (1949) and The Confidential Clerk (1953) were based on Euripides' Alcestis and Ion respectively; The Elder Statesman (1958) on Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. In them Eliot moved closer to a mannered realism, disguising his serious purpose under the form of modern drawing-room comedy, and discarding the closely wrought poetic style of the earlier plays for a plain undecorated verse. All his plays were directed by E. Martin Browne.

Eliot, T. S. (1888–1965). Poet and man of letters. Born in St Louis, after Harvard he studied in Europe, in 1927 becoming a British citizen. With the encouragement of Ezra Pound he produced The Waste Land (1922), usually seen as a commentary on the western civilization which collapsed in the Great War, though he preferred to think of it as ‘a piece of rhythmical grumbling’. Equally innovative literary criticism helped create the taste by which he was admired, though in 1927 his confirmation in the Anglican church to many seemed an anachronism. For others, the religious poetry of Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943) is his most profound response to the times. Attempts to restore poetic drama to the West End stage had more mixed success, though Murder in the Cathedral (1935) has endured. By now very much an establishment figure, he found solace in a late second marriage happier than his first.

John Saunders

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888–1965), poet and critic. An American by birth, he worked in a bank in London. From 1922 to 1939 he edited The Criterion. He joined the board of Faber, the publisher, in 1925.

Brought up in the Unitarian tradition, Eliot passed through a period of agnosticism reflected in his earlier poetry. In 1927 he was baptized in the C of E. Henceforth much of his poetry, culminating in the Four Quartets (1935–42), expressed his religious search, his struggle with faith and doubt, and his attempt to find fresh meaning in tradition. His poetical drama was less successful but also tried to communicate something of the dilemmas of faith, notably in Murder in the Cathedral (1935; written for the Canterbury Festival). He was deeply interested in the social implications of Christianity.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888–1965). Poet and critic. His religious background was Unitarian, which gave way to a despairing agnosticism which finds expression in his early poems and, especially, The Waste Land (1922). Many religious traditions appealed to him, including Hindu philosophy, Neo-Thomism, and the classical Anglicanism of Andrewes and the Metaphysical poets (though an anti-Semitic note is also evident), and in 1927 he was baptized and declared himself ‘an Anglo-Catholic in religion’. His later poems (especially Four Quartets, 1935–42) and his plays explore human doubt and scepticism within an intellectual framework, with deep traditional roots in the mystics, Dante, and the Greek tragedians: what is believed is more readily lived than expressed in words.

Eliot, T. S. (1888–1965). Poet. Born in St Louis, after Harvard he studied in Europe, in 1927 becoming a British citizen. The Waste Land (1922) is usually seen as a commentary on the western civilization which collapsed in the Great War. For others, the religious poetry of Ash‐Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943) is his most profound response. Attempts to restore poetic drama to the West End stage had mixed success, though Murder in the Cathedral (1935) has endured.