Biography t.s. eliot

Poet, dramatist, and critic Thomas Stearns Eliot b. His critical writings also shaped literary taste and study in the 20th century. Born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, by a Unitarian family with deep roots in American history, he was educated at Harvard and wrote his first significant poems during his year abroad in Paris, — After completing most of the work for a PhD in philosophy, he found himself abroad again during the outbreak of World War I, and he decided to marry an Englishwoman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and put down roots in London.

His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observationssurprised readers with its modern vocabulary, free-verse rhythms, and compelling dramatic voices. Considered his greatest work and probably the most significant poem of the 20th century, The Waste Land expresses his personal emotional conflict in terms of the larger historical currents of the immediate postwar period: the aftershocks of war, a crisis of faith, changing gender roles, urbanization, and a sense of deracination from the past.

Erudite, multilingual, and difficult to read, but also highly charged with feeling, this poem captured the spirit of the interwar era, received more sustained attention than any other literary work in the 20th century, and is known and quoted across the globe. Eliot further distinguished himself by converting to the Anglican church in and becoming its leading poet and dramatist with his conversion poem Ash-Wednesdaythe play Murder in the Cathedral first performedand the long lyric sequence Four Quartets — Soon after the turn of the century, Eliot began seeing his poems and short stories in print, and writing would occupy him for the rest of his life.

Eliot began courses at Harvard University ingraduating three years later with a Bachelor of Arts degree. At Harvard, he was greatly influenced by professors renowned in poetry, philosophy and literary criticism, and the rest of his literary career would be shaped by all three. After graduating, Eliot served as a philosophy assistant at Harvard for a year, and then left for France and the Sorbonne to study philosophy.

From toEliot was back at Harvard, where he deepened his knowledge by reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit. He finished his advanced degree at Harvard while in Europe, but due to the onset of World War I, he never went back to Harvard to take the final oral exam for his Ph. Not long after, he became a bank clerk—a position he would hold until It was around this time that Eliot began a lifelong friendship with American poet Ezra Poundwho immediately recognized Eliot's poetic genius and worked to publish his work.

Alfred Prufrock," which appeared in Poetry in His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observationsfollowed inand the collection established Eliot as a leading poet of his day. While writing poetry and tending to his day job, Eliot was busy writing literary criticism and reviews, and his work in the criticism field would become as respected as his poetry.

Eliot's dedication to il miglior fabbro 'the better craftsman' refers to Ezra Pound's significant hand in editing and reshaping the poem from a longer manuscript to the shortened version that appears in publication. It was composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot—his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders.

On 15 Novemberhe wrote to Richard Aldingtonsaying, "As for The Waste Landthat is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style. The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.

The poem is known for its disjointed nature due to its usage of allusion and quotation and its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. This structural complexity is one of the reasons that the poem has become a touchstone of modern literaturea poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year, James Joyce 's Ulysses.

Among its best-known phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These "biographies t.s. eliot" I have shored against my ruins". For the critic Edmund Wilsonit marked "The nadir of the phase of despair and desolation given such effective expression in 'The Waste Land'. Similar to Eliot's other works, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary.

Post-war Europe under the Treaty of Versailles which Eliot despisedthe difficulty of hope and religious conversion, Eliot's failed marriage. Published init deals with the struggle that ensues when a person who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation.

Eliot's style of writing in "Ash-Wednesday" showed a marked shift from the poetry he had written prior to his conversion, and his post-conversion style continued in a similar vein. His style became less ironic, and the poems were no longer populated by multiple characters in dialogue. Eliot's subject matter also became more focused on his spiritual concerns and his Christian faith.

Many critics were particularly enthusiastic about "Ash-Wednesday". Edwin Muir maintained that it is one of the most moving poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect", though it was not well received by everyone. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of the more secular literati. The first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover.

Inthe composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems for speaker and orchestra in a work titled Practical Cats. After Eliot's death, the book was the basis of the musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webberfirst produced in London's West End in and opening on Broadway the following year. Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that most of all led him to being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Each has biography t.s. eliot sections. Although they resist easy characterisation, each poem includes meditations on the nature of time in some important respect— theologicalhistorical, physical—and its relation to the human condition. Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elementsrespectively: air, earth, water, and fire.

In the final section, the narrator contemplates the arts "words" and "music" as they relate to time. Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope. The Four Quartets draws upon Christian theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, and mystics St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich.

With the important exception of Four QuartetsEliot directed much of his creative energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. In a lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility. He would like to be something of a popular entertainer and be able to think his own thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask.

He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which to do it. After The Waste Landhe wrote that he was "now feeling toward a new form and style". One project he had in mind was writing a play in verse, using some of the rhythms of early jazz.

The play featured "Sweeney", a character who had appeared in a number of his poems. Although Eliot did not biography t.s. eliot the play, he did publish two scenes from the piece. These scenes, titled Fragment of a Prologue and Fragment of an Agonwere published together in as Sweeney Agonistes. Although Eliot noted that this was not intended to be a one-act play, it is sometimes performed as one.

A pageant play by Eliot called The Rock was performed in for the benefit of churches in the Diocese of London. Much of it was a collaborative effort; Eliot accepted credit only for the authorship of one scene and the choruses. Martin Browne for the production of The Rockand later commissioned Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in This one, Murder in the Cathedralconcerning the martyrdom of Thomas Becketwas more under Eliot's control.

Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd comments that "for [Eliot], Murder in the Cathedral and succeeding verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to practice poetry but it also offered a convenient home for his religious sensibility. Martin Browne [ 88 ]. Regarding his method of playwriting, Eliot explained, "If I set out to write a play, I start by an act of choice.

I settle upon a particular emotional situation, out of which characters and a plot will emerge. And then lines of poetry may come into being: not from the original impulse but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind. Eliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticismand strongly influenced the school of New Criticism.

He was somewhat self-deprecating and minimising of his work and once said his criticism was merely a "by-product" of his "private poetry-workshop". But the critic William Empson once said, "I do not know for certain how much of my own mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him.

He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind. In his critical essay " Tradition and the Individual Talent ", Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poem The Waste Land.

Biography t.s. eliot: Thomas Stearns Eliot OM

Also important to New Criticism was the idea—as articulated in Eliot's essay " Hamlet and His Problems "—of an " objective correlative ", which posits a connection among the words of the text and events, states of mind, and experiences. More generally, New Critics took a cue from Eliot in regard to his "'classical' ideals and his religious thought; his attention to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century; his deprecation of the Romantics, especially Percy Shelley ; his proposition that good poems constitute 'not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence that 'poets Eliot's essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets.

Eliot particularly praised the metaphysical poets' ability to show experience as both psychological and sensual, while at the same time infusing this portrayal with—in Eliot's view—wit and uniqueness. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets", along with giving new significance and attention to metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of "unified sensibility", which is considered by some to mean the same thing as the term "metaphysical".

His poem The Waste Land [ 98 ] also can be better understood in light of his work as a critic. He had argued that a poet must write "programmatic criticism", that is, a poet should write to advance his own interests rather than to advance "historical scholarship". Viewed from Eliot's critical lens, The Waste Land likely shows his personal despair about the First World War rather than an objective historical understanding of it.

Biography t.s. eliot: Thomas Stearns Eliot OM

Late in his career, Eliot focused much of his creative energy on writing for the theatre; some of his earlier critical writing, in essays such as "Poetry and Drama", [ ] "Hamlet and his Problems", [ 94 ] and "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama", [ ] focused on the aesthetics of writing drama in verse. Alfred Prufrock", "Portrait of a Lady", "La Figlia Che Piange", "Preludes", and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" had "[an] effect [that] was both unique and compelling, and their assurance staggered [Eliot's] contemporaries who were privileged to read them in manuscript.

The wholeness is there, from the very beginning. The initial critical response to Eliot's The Waste Land was mixed. Bush noted that the piece was at first correctly perceived as a work of jazz-like syncopation—and, like s jazzessentially iconoclastic. Edmund Wilson, being one of the critics who praised Eliot, called him "one of our only authentic poets".

In regard to The Waste LandWilson admits its flaws "its lack of structural unity"but concluded, "I doubt whether there is a single other poem of equal length by a contemporary American which displays so high and so varied a mastery of English verse. Charles Powell was critical in his assessment of Eliot, calling his poems incomprehensible. For instance, though Ransom negatively criticised The Waste Land for its "extreme disconnection", Ransom was not completely condemnatory of Eliot's work and admitted that Eliot was a talented poet.

Addressing some of the common criticisms directed against The Waste Land at the time, Gilbert Seldes stated, "It seems at first sight remarkably disconnected and confused Eliot's reputation as a poet, as well as his influence in the academy, peaked following the publication of The Four Quartets. In an essay on Eliot published inthe writer Cynthia Ozick refers to this peak of influence from the s through the early s as "the Age of Eliot" when Eliot "seemed pure zenith, a biography t.s.

eliot, nothing less than a permanent luminary, fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon". As Eliot's conservative religious and political convictions began to seem less congenial in the postwar world, other readers reacted with suspicion to his assertions of authority, obvious in Four Quartets and implicit in the earlier poetry.

The result, fueled by intermittent rediscovery of Eliot's occasional anti-Semitic rhetoric, has been a progressive downward revision of his once towering reputation. Bush also notes that Eliot's reputation "slipped" significantly further after his death. He writes, "Sometimes regarded as too academic William Carlos Williams 's viewEliot was also frequently criticized for a deadening neoclassicism as he himself—perhaps just as unfairly—had criticized Milton.

However, the multifarious tributes from practicing poets of many schools published during his centenary in was a strong indication of the intimidating continued presence of his poetic voice. Literary scholars, such as Harold Bloom [ ] and Stephen Greenblatt[ ] acknowledge Eliot's biography t.s. eliot as central to the literary English canon.

For instance, the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature write, "There is no disagreement on [Eliot's] importance as one of the great renovators of the English poetry dialect, whose influence on a whole generation of poets, critics, and intellectuals generally was enormous. The depiction of Jews in some of Eliot's poems has led several critics to accuse him of antisemitismmost forcefully Anthony Julius in his book T.

Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form It reaches out like a clear signal to the reader. In lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in published in under the title After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern HeresyEliot wrote of societal tradition and coherence, "What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.

In In Defence of T. Eliot and T. EliotCraig Raine defended Eliot from the charge of anti-Semitism. Eliot's well-earned reputation [as a poet] is established beyond all doubt, and making him out to be as unflawed as the Archangel Gabriel does him no favours. Eliot was a strong influence on 20th-century Caribbean poetry written in English, including the epic Omeros by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott[ ] and Islands by Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite.

Below is a partial list of honours and awards received by Eliot or bestowed or created in his honour. These honours are displayed in order of precedence based on Eliot's nationality and rules of protocol, not awarding date. Eliot Bibliography".

Biography t.s. eliot: TS Eliot was an American-English poet,

Archived from the original on 7 November Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. American-born British poet — For other people named Thomas Eliot, see Thomas Eliot disambiguation. Poet essayist playwright publisher critic. United States — United Kingdom — Nobel Prize in Literature Order of Merit Vivienne Haigh-Wood.

Life [ edit ]. Early life and education [ edit ]. Marriage [ edit ]. Teaching, banking, and publishing [ edit ]. Conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship [ edit ]. Separation and remarriage [ edit ]. Death and honours [ edit ]. Poetry [ edit ]. Alfred Prufrock" [ edit ]. Main article: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Waste Land [ edit ].

Main article: The Waste Land. Main article: The Hollow Men. Main article: Ash Wednesday poem. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats [ edit ]. Four Quartets [ edit ]. Main article: Four Quartets. Plays [ edit ]. Literary criticism [ edit ]. Critical reception [ edit ]. Responses to his poetry [ edit ]. Antisemitism [ edit ]. Influence [ edit ].

Honours and awards [ edit ]. National or state honours [ edit ]. Literary awards [ edit ]. Eliot —. Read poems by this poet. Eliot died in London on January 4, Cummings Edward Estlin Cummings is known for his radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax; he abandoned traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression.

Photo credit: George Platt Lynes. Marianne Moore Born inMarianne Moore wrote with the freedom characteristic of the other Modernist poets, often incorporating quotes from other sources into the text, yet her use of language was always extraordinarily condensed and precise. Email Address.