ELIOT, THOMAS STEARNS

Anglo-American poet and critic; b. St. Louis, Mo., Sept. 26, 1888, d. London, Jan. 4, 1965. He was the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Stearns

Eliot, and the grandson of William Greenleaf Eliot, Unitarian minister and founder of Washington University, St. Louis. At Harvard, then under the presidency of his distant relative C. W. Eliot, he encountered dante, the metaphysical poets and the French symbolists and commenced writing experimental verse that borrowed its voice from Jules Laforgue and its habits of imagery from late Elizabethan drama. After receiving his bachelor's (1909) and master's (1910) degrees, he spent a year in Paris, where he wrote much of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and then returned to Harvard for graduate study in philosophy (1911–14), envisaging an academic career. Further work in Germany was cut short by World War I, and in 1914 he enrolled at Merton College, Oxford, where he read Aristotle's Posterior Analytics and commenced his doctoral thesis on Francis Herbert bradley's theory of knowledge. His marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood in 1915 marked the termination of his academic career. He submitted the thesis to Harvard in 1916 but never took the degree. Eliot worked in the foreign exchange department at Lloyd's Bank and reviewed numerous books for small sums. These labors, added to the work of equipping himself to be a poet in the contemporary world and the strain of coping with his wife's continual emotional derangements, brought on by 1921 a comprehensive breakdown; during his recuperation at Margate and Lausanne he wrote the first major 20th-century poem in English, The Waste Land.

In September 1914 Eliot had met Ezra Pound in London. Pound secured publication of "Prufrock" in Poetry (Chicago) and during several years' close association accelerated Eliot's assimilation of models and his development of a sharp, unrhetorical, virtuosic verse technique. By 1919 Eliot had blocked out, and in large part occupied, the intellectual territory from which he meant to operate. He had arrived at a workable view of literary tradition: the past that has been deliberately assimilated, the past to the future understanding of which present work in turn, if rightly done, will make an irreversible difference. He had clarified his grasp of the tradition accessible to him, which drew vitality from the Elizabethans and the metaphysicals and from 19th-century France. But he found in Milton a "Chinese Wall"; in the Romantics, insufficient knowledge; and in the Victorians, diffuse rumination. He had perfected, in a series of poems in quatrains, an aesthetic of sinewy statement, playing against the closed form a rich syntactic variety. And he had defined the dramatic function of rhetoric: a symptom of the speaker's absorption with the figure he is cutting, and so the precise index of a mind's self-consciousness.

Key Poetry. All this knowledge is articulated in The Waste Land, in which the poet's awareness of his own plight echoes the weary self-consciousness of the postwar "mind of Europe," stored with resonant fragments and preoccupied with imaginative and spiritual drought. A tough arid eloquence pervades its mosaic of allusions. Shakespeare and St. Augustine, Buddha and Andrew Marvell, the Journey to Emmaus and the Grail-Knight's pilgrimage to a deserted chapel where to inquire after the meaning of symbols is perhaps to resurrect them, all enter a plenum in which the 20th-century imagination has ever since been learning to know its own identity. This poem (1922) and the essays in The Sacred Wood (1920) affirmed but did not for some years implement Eliot's authority as the presiding intelligence in literary London and ultimately in the English-speaking West.

"The Hollow Men" (1925), a dry, dead spiritual void amid which articulation is miraculously sustained, terminated what Eliot expected to be his final collection of verse. He was editing the Criterion (1922–39) and working in the publishing firm founded by Geoffrey Faber. In 1927, however, he commenced a new life, naturalized as a British subject; confirmed in the Church of England, of which he was to become his time's most eminent lay communicant; and initiating with "Journey of the Magi" (1927) a sequence of religious poems that culminated in Ash-Wednesday (1930) and bore autumnal fruit in the major work of his maturity, Four Quartets (1935–42).

The church attracted him initially by its embodiment of his idea of tradition, by its transcendental authority in a shifting time, and by its power to define as a meaningful ideal the asceticism that for the poet of The Waste Land had been only an appalled refusal of chaotic sensuality. His Magi, in the blank years when the Word on earth has not yet undertaken his ministry, have been accorded not peace but a permanent alienation from the world's satisfactions. His most conspicuously Christian poem, Ash-Wednesday, begins by not hoping to turn again (as though going back, not on, would be a good thing if one were permitted to hope for it) and closes in "the dream-crossed twilight between birth and dying," praying to learn "to care and not to care."

Murder in the Cathedral (1935) may be read as a commentary on Ash-Wednesday. In this play about the murder of St. Thomas becket, the archbishop must learn to care and not to care; for if he merely chooses not to care, and abandons himself to his destroyers, he will be a suicide rather than a martyr. Probably no drama has ever explored so subtle a moral point; but even in the extraordinary scene in which Thomas is tempted by fore-knowledge of his own beatification, Eliot's hand is sure—and a Christian drama emerges from what a merely clever writer would have turned into an intellectual puzzle; and a merely theatrical writer, into a thriller.

Out of passages not used in this play grew "Burnt Norton" (1935); out of "Burnt Norton," under the stress of the war years, grew Four Quartets, Eliot's comprehensive meditation on the meaning of his own life and that of his ancestors, the contemporary world and the past it fulfils and half disowns, the Christian revelation and the secular pleasures it incorporates, judges, and transcends. The décor, like that of Gray's Elegy, comes from the 18th-century tradition of the local meditative poem; the structure of each Quartet is drawn from that of "The Waste Land"; the images extend those of Eliot's earlier poems; the whole is quiet, steeped in tradition, and utterly modern, suggesting, as the title implies, a wordless conversation like that among stringed instruments. Only George Herbert's The Temple (1633) supplies partial analogies for the quality of feeling in this purest and most characteristic of Eliot's works, and only Rilke's Duino Elegies offers a parallel modern concern for the feel of living in time under eternal sanctions.

Popular Theater. In 1947 Mrs. Eliot died; they had long been legally separated. In 1948 Eliot received the Order of Merit and the Nobel prize for literature. In 1950, with The Cocktail Party, a play about contrasting modes of salvation, he reached a large popular audience for the first time. Two more plays for the popular theater followed, The Confidential Clerk (1954) and The Elder Statesman (1959). In 1957 T. S. Eliot's marriage to Valerie Fletcher inaugurated what were conspicuously the happiest years of his life. He wrote little, traveled much, continued on a reduced schedule his work as a partner of Faber and Faber, and enjoyed, with some irony, the esteem in which he was held as England's most eminent man of letters. His last publication was the long-suppressed 48-year-old doctoral thesis on Bradley's philosophy, which dated from the end of his academic career and the beginning of his life as a poet and man of letters. His ashes were interred in the Somerset village of East Coker, celebrated in Four Quartets, where Eliots or Elyots lived for some two centuries before the poet's ancestor Andrew Eliot emigrated in 1667 to found the American branch of the family. "East Coker" begins, "In my beginning is my end," and closes, "In my end is my beginning."

Bibliography: t. s. eliot, Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (New York 1963); Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (2d ed. New York 1950); Murder in the Cathedral (New York 1935); The Family Reunion (New York 1939); The Cocktail Party (New York 1950); The Confidential Clerk (New York 1954); The Elder Statesman (New York 1959); The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (Cambridge, Mass. 1933); The Idea of a Christian Society (New York 1940). d. c. gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (New York 1953). h. kenner, The Invisible Poet (New York 1959); ed., T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1962). n. frye, T. S. Eliot (New York 1963). g. c. smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (Chicago 1956). b. rajan, ed., T. S. Eliot: A Study of His Writings by Several Hands (New York 1948). l. unger, T. S. Eliot: A Selected Critique (New York 1948). g. williamson, Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis (New York 1953). h. howarth, Notes on Some Figures behind T. S. Eliot (Boston 1964), contains much biog. material. r. s. kennedy, Working out Salvation with Diligence: The Plays of T. S. Eliot (Wichita, Kans.,1964). kenneth asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995). anthony julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995). caroline phillips, The Religious Quest in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot (Lewiston, N.Y., 1995). narsingh srivastava, The Poetry of T.S. Eliot: A Study in Religious Sensibility (New Delhi, 1991).

[h. kenner]