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T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor.[1] He is considered to be one of the 20th century's greatest poets, as well as a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry. His use of language, writing style, and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often reevaluated long-held cultural beliefs.[2]

T. S. Eliot

Eliot in 1934 by Lady Ottoline Morrell
BornThomas Stearns Eliot
(1888-09-26)26 September 1888
St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Died4 January 1965(1965-01-04) (aged 76)
London, England
Occupation
  • Poet
  • essayist
  • playwright
  • publisher
  • critic
CitizenshipUSA (1888–1927)
UK (1927–1965)
EducationHarvard University (AB, AM)
Merton College, Oxford
Period1905–1965
Literary movementModernism
Notable works"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915)
The Waste Land (1922)
The Hollow Men (1925)
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
Four Quartets (1943)
Notable awards
Spouse
(m. 1915; sep. 1932)
(m. 1957)
ParentsHenry Ware Eliot
Charlotte Champe Stearns
RelativesEliot family
Signature

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there.[3] He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39 and renounced his American citizenship.[4]

Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" from 1914 to 1915, which, at the time of its publication, was considered outlandish.[5] It was followed by The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1943).[6] He was also known for seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".[7][8]

Life edit

Early life and education edit

The Eliots were a Boston Brahmin family, with roots in England and New England. Eliot's paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri,[6][9] to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843–1929), who wrote poetry, was a social worker, which was a new profession in the U.S. in the early 20th century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns.

Eliot's childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors. First, he had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socialising with his peers. As he was often isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy immediately became obsessed with books, favouring tales of savage life, the Wild West, or Mark Twain's thrill-seeking Tom Sawyer.[10]

In his memoir about Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot "would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living."[11] Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."[12]

From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, the boys college preparatory division of Washington University, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was 14 under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them.[13] His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905.[14] Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard University's student literary magazine.[15] He published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". The last mentioned story reflected his exploration of the Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis.[16][17][18] His interest in indigenous peoples thus predated his anthropological studies at Harvard.[19]

Eliot lived in St. Louis, Missouri, for the first 16 years of his life at the house on Locust Street where he was born. After going away to school in 1905, he returned to St. Louis only for vacations and visits. Despite moving away from the city, Eliot wrote to a friend that "Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world."[20]

Following graduation from Smith Academy, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer who later published The Waste Land. He studied at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning a Bachelor of Arts in an elective program similar to comparative literature in 1909 and a Master of Arts in English literature the following year.[1][6] Because of his year at Milton Academy, Eliot was allowed to earn his Bachelor of Arts after three years instead of the usual four.[21] Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908 when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature. This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book Les amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot's life.[22] The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken, the American writer and critic.[23]

After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Henri Alban-Fournier.[6][22] From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit.[6][24] Whilst a member of the Harvard Graduate School, Eliot met and fell in love with Emily Hale.[25] Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. He first visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer programme, but when the First World War broke out he went to Oxford instead. At the time so many American students attended Merton that the Junior Common Room proposed a motion "that this society abhors the Americanization of Oxford". It was defeated by two votes after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture.[26]

Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls [...] Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead."[26] Escaping Oxford, Eliot spent much of his time in London. This city had a monumental and life-altering effect on Eliot for several reasons, the most significant of which was his introduction to the influential American literary figure Ezra Pound. A connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on 22 September 1914, Eliot paid a visit to Pound's flat. Pound instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" and was crucial to Eliot's fledgling career as a poet, as he is credited with promoting Eliot through social events and literary gatherings. Thus, according to biographer John Worthen, during his time in England Eliot "was seeing as little of Oxford as possible". He was instead spending long periods of time in London, in the company of Ezra Pound and "some of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared [...] It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere."[27] In the end, Eliot did not settle at Merton and left after a year. In 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck, University of London.[28]

In 1916, he completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on "Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley", but he failed to return for the viva voce exam.[6][29]

Marriage edit

 
Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, passport photograph from 1920

Before leaving the US, Eliot had told Emily Hale that he was in love with her. He exchanged letters with her from Oxford during 1914 and 1915, but they did not meet again until 1927.[25][30] In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote: "I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society)."[31] Less than four months later, Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess. They were married at Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915.[32]

After a short visit, alone, to his family in the United States, Eliot returned to London and took several teaching jobs, such as lecturing at Birkbeck College, University of London. The philosopher Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars have suggested that she and Russell had an affair, but the allegations were never confirmed.[33]

The marriage seems to have been markedly unhappy, in part because of Vivienne's health problems. In a letter addressed to Ezra Pound, she covers an extensive list of her symptoms, which included a habitually high temperature, fatigue, insomnia, migraines, and colitis.[34] This, coupled with apparent mental instability, meant that she was often sent away by Eliot and her doctors for extended periods of time in the hope of improving her health. As time went on, he became increasingly detached from her. According to witnesses, both Eliots were frequent complainers of illness, physical and mental, while Eliot would drink excessively and Vivienne is said to have developed a liking for opium and ether, drugs prescribed for medical issues. It is claimed that the couple's wearying behaviour caused some visitors to vow never to spend another evening in the company of both together.[35] The couple formally separated in 1933, and in 1938 Vivienne's brother, Maurice, had her committed to a mental hospital, against her will, where she remained until her death of heart disease in 1947. When told via a phone call from the asylum that Vivienne had died unexpectedly during the night, Eliot is said to have buried his face in his hands and cried out 'Oh God, oh God.'[35]

Their relationship became the subject of a 1984 play Tom & Viv, which in 1994 was adapted as a film of the same name.

In a private paper written in his sixties, Eliot confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of [Ezra] Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."[36]

Teaching, banking, and publishing edit

 
A plaque at SOAS's Faber Building, 24 Russell Square, London

After leaving Merton, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably at Highgate School in London, where he taught French and Latin: his students included John Betjeman.[6] He subsequently taught at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. To earn extra money, he wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses at University College London and Oxford. In 1917, he took a position at Lloyds Bank in London, working on foreign accounts. On a trip to Paris in August 1920 with the artist Wyndham Lewis, he met the writer James Joyce. Eliot said he found Joyce arrogant, and Joyce doubted Eliot's ability as a poet at the time, but the two writers soon became friends, with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever he was in Paris.[37] Eliot and Wyndham Lewis also maintained a close friendship, leading to Lewis's later making his well-known portrait painting of Eliot in 1938.

Charles Whibley recommended T.S. Eliot to Geoffrey Faber.[38] In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds to become a director in the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), where he remained for the rest of his career.[39][40] At Faber and Faber, he was responsible for publishing distinguished English poets, including W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Charles Madge and Ted Hughes.[41]

Conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship edit

 
The Faber and Faber building where Eliot worked from 1925 to 1965; the commemorative plaque is under the right-hand arch.

On 29 June 1927, Eliot converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism, and in November that year he took British citizenship, thereby renouncing his United States citizenship in the event he had not officially done so previously.[42] He became a churchwarden of his parish church, St Stephen's, Gloucester Road, London, and a life member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr.[43][44] He specifically identified as Anglo-Catholic, proclaiming himself "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion".[45][46]

About 30 years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament".[47] He also had wider spiritual interests, commenting that "I see the path of progress for modern man in his occupation with his own self, with his inner being" and citing Goethe and Rudolf Steiner as exemplars of such a direction.[48]

One of Eliot's biographers, Peter Ackroyd, commented that "the purposes of [Eliot's conversion] were two-fold. One: the Church of England offered Eliot some hope for himself, and I think Eliot needed some resting place. But secondly, it attached Eliot to the English community and English culture."[41]

Separation and remarriage edit

By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. When Harvard offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932–1933 academic year, he accepted and left Vivienne in England. Upon his return, he arranged for a formal separation from her, avoiding all but one meeting with her between his leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947. Vivienne was committed to the Northumberland House mental hospital in Woodberry Down, Manor House, London, in 1938, and remained there until she died. Although Eliot was still legally her husband, he never visited her.[49] From 1933 to 1946 Eliot had a close emotional relationship with Emily Hale. Eliot later destroyed Hale's letters to him, but Hale donated Eliot's to Princeton University Library where they were sealed, following Eliot's and Hale's wishes, for 50 years after both had died, until 2020.[50] When Eliot heard of the donation he deposited his own account of their relationship with Harvard University to be opened whenever the Princeton letters were.[25]

From 1938 to 1957 Eliot's public companion was Mary Trevelyan of London University, who wanted to marry him and left a detailed memoir.[51][52][53]

From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat at 19 Carlyle Mansions, Chelsea, with his friend John Davy Hayward, who collected and managed Eliot's papers, styling himself "Keeper of the Eliot Archive".[54][55] Hayward also collected Eliot's pre-Prufrock verse, commercially published after Eliot's death as Poems Written in Early Youth. When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge, in 1965.

On 10 January 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ceremony was held in St. Barnabas Church, Kensington, London,[56] at 6:15 am with virtually no one in attendance other than his wife's parents. In the early 1960s, by then in failing health, Eliot worked as an editor for the Wesleyan University Press, seeking new poets in Europe for publication. After Eliot's death, Valerie dedicated her time to preserving his legacy, by editing and annotating The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land.[57] Valerie Eliot died on 9 November 2012 at her home in London.[58]

Eliot had no children with either of his wives.

Death and honours edit

 
Blue plaque, 3 Kensington Court Gardens, Kensington, London, home from 1957 until his death in 1965

Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965,[59] and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.[60] In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken to St Michael and All Angels' Church, East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors had emigrated to America.[61] A wall plaque in the church commemorates him with a quotation from his poem East Coker: "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning."[62]

In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, Eliot was commemorated by the placement of a large stone in the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey. The stone, cut by designer Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates, his Order of Merit, and a quotation from his poem Little Gidding, "the communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living."[63]

In 1986, a blue plaque was placed on the apartment block - No. 3 Kensington Court Gardens - where he lived and died.[64]

Poetry edit

For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced relatively few poems. He was aware of this even early in his career; he wrote to J. H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."[65]

Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small books or pamphlets and then collected them in books. His first collection was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). In 1920, he published more poems in Ara Vos Prec (London) and Poems: 1920 (New York). These had the same poems (in a different order) except that "Ode" in the British edition was replaced with "Hysteria" in the American edition. In 1925, he collected The Waste Land and the poems in Prufrock and Poems into one volume and added The Hollow Men to form Poems: 1909–1925. From then on, he updated this work as Collected Poems. Exceptions are Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection of light verse; Poems Written in Early Youth, posthumously published in 1967 and consisting mainly of poems published between 1907 and 1910 in The Harvard Advocate, and Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, material Eliot never intended to have published, which appeared posthumously in 1996.[66]

During an interview in 1959, Eliot said of his nationality and its role in his work: "I'd say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I'm sure of. ... It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good; putting it as modestly as I can, it wouldn't be what it is if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America."[67]

Cleo McNelly Kearns notes in her biography that Eliot was deeply influenced by Indic traditions, notably the Upanishads. From the Sanskrit ending of The Waste Land to the "What Krishna meant" section of Four Quartets shows how much Indic religions and more specifically Hinduism made up his philosophical basic for his thought process.[68] It must also be acknowledged, as Chinmoy Guha showed in his book Where the Dreams Cross: T S Eliot and French Poetry (Macmillan, 2011) that he was deeply influenced by French poets from Baudelaire to Paul Valéry. He himself wrote in his 1940 essay on W.B. Yeats: "The kind of poetry that I needed to teach me the use of my own voice did not exist in English at all; it was only to be found in French." ("Yeats", On Poetry and Poets, 1948).

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" edit

In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended to Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she should publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".[69] Although the character Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only twenty-two. Its now-famous opening lines, comparing the evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table", were considered shocking and offensive, especially at a time when Georgian Poetry was hailed for its derivations of the nineteenth century Romantic Poets.[70]

The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante and refers to a number of literary works, including Hamlet and those of the French Symbolists. Its reception in London can be gauged from an unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement on 21 June 1917. "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry."[71]

The Waste Land edit

 
Eliot in 1923 by Lady Ottoline Morrell

In October 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion. 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.[72]

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.[73] Before the poem's publication as a book in December 1922, Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair. On 15 November 1922, he wrote to Richard Aldington, saying, "As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style."[74] The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation.[75] Dismissing this view, Eliot commented in 1931, "When I wrote a poem called The Waste Land, some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed 'the disillusion of a generation', which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention."[76]

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 literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses.[77][page needed]

Among its best-known phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".[78]

"The Hollow Men" edit

"The Hollow Men" appeared in 1925. For the critic Edmund Wilson, it marked "The nadir of the phase of despair and desolation given such effective expression in 'The Waste Land'."[79] It is Eliot's major poem of the late 1920s. Similar to Eliot's other works, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary. Post-war Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, Eliot's failed marriage.[80]

Allen Tate perceived a shift in Eliot's method, writing, "The mythologies disappear altogether in 'The Hollow Men'." This is a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante as anything else in Eliot's early work, to say little of the modern English mythology—the "Old Guy Fawkes" of the Gunpowder Plot—or the colonial and agrarian mythos of Joseph Conrad and James George Frazer, which, at least for reasons of textual history, echo in The Waste Land.[81] The "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" that is so characteristic of his mythical method remained in fine form.[82] "The Hollow Men" contains some of Eliot's most famous lines, notably its conclusion:

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

"Ash-Wednesday" edit

"Ash-Wednesday" is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, it 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 1927 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.[83]

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.[6][84]

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats edit

In 1939, Eliot published a book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. ("Old Possum" was Ezra Pound's friendly nickname for Eliot.) The first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover. In 1954, the 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 Webber, first produced in London's West End in 1981 and opening on Broadway the following year.[85]

Four Quartets edit

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.[6] It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: "Burnt Norton" (1936), "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941) and "Little Gidding" (1942). Each has five sections. Although they resist easy characterisation, each poem includes meditations on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation to the human condition. Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements, respectively: air, earth, water, and fire.

"Burnt Norton" is a meditative poem that begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present moment while walking through a garden, focusing on images and sounds such as the bird, the roses, clouds and an empty pool. The meditation leads the narrator to reach "the still point" in which there is no attempt to get anywhere or to experience place and/or time, instead experiencing "a grace of sense". In the final section, the narrator contemplates the arts ("words" and "music") as they relate to time. The narrator focuses particularly on the poet's art of manipulating "Words [which] strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden [of time], under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, [and] will not stay in place, / Will not stay still." By comparison, the narrator concludes that "Love is itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of movement, / Timeless, and undesiring."

"East Coker" continues the examination of time and meaning, focusing in a famous passage on the nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope."

"The Dry Salvages" treats the element of water, via images of river and sea. It strives to contain opposites: "The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled."

"Little Gidding" (the element of fire) is the most anthologised of the Quartets.[86] Eliot's experiences as an air raid warden in the Blitz power the poem, and he imagines meeting Dante during the German bombing. The beginning of the Quartets ("Houses / Are removed, destroyed") had become a violent everyday experience; this creates an animation, where for the first time he talks of love as the driving force behind all experience. From this background, the Quartets end with an affirmation of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well."[87]

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.[87]

Plays edit

With the important exception of Four Quartets, Eliot directed much of his creative energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in The Waste Land. In a 1933 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."[88]

After The Waste Land (1922), he 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 finish the play, he did publish two scenes from the piece. These scenes, titled Fragment of a Prologue (1926) and Fragment of an Agon (1927), were published together in 1932 as Sweeney Agonistes. Although Eliot noted that this was not intended to be a one-act play, it is sometimes performed as one.[14]

A pageant play by Eliot called The Rock was performed in 1934 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.[14] George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had been instrumental in connecting Eliot with producer E. Martin Browne for the production of The Rock, and later commissioned Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This one, Murder in the Cathedral, concerning the death of the martyr, Thomas Becket, was 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."[41] After this, he worked on more "commercial" plays for more general audiences: The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk, (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958) (the latter three were produced by Henry Sherek and directed by E. Martin Browne[89]). The Broadway production in New York of The Cocktail Party received the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. Eliot wrote The Cocktail Party while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study.[90][91]

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."[41]

Literary criticism edit

Eliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism, and 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."[92]

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. "In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past."[93] This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous works, a "simultaneous order" of works (i.e., "tradition"). Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poem The Waste Land.[94]

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.[95] This notion concedes that a poem means what it says, but suggests that there can be a non-subjective judgment based on different readers' different—but perhaps corollary—interpretations of a work.

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 Shelley; his proposition that good poems constitute 'not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence that 'poets... at present must be difficult'."[96]

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".[97][98]

His 1922 poem The Waste Land[99] 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 World War I rather than an objective historical understanding of it.[100]

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",[101] "Hamlet and his Problems",[95] and "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama",[102] focused on the aesthetics of writing drama in verse.

Critical reception edit

Responses to his poetry edit

The writer Ronald Bush notes that Eliot's early poems like "The Love Song of J. 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. [Conrad] Aiken, for example, marveled at 'how sharp and complete and sui generis the whole thing was, from the outset. The wholeness is there, from the very beginning.'"[1]

The initial critical response to Eliot's The Waste Land was mixed. Bush notes that the piece was at first correctly perceived as a work of jazz-like syncopation—and, like 1920s jazz, essentially iconoclastic."[1] Some critics, like Edmund Wilson, Conrad Aiken, and Gilbert Seldes thought it was the best poetry being written in the English language while others thought it was esoteric and wilfully difficult. Edmund Wilson, being one of the critics who praised Eliot, called him "one of our only authentic poets".[103] Wilson also pointed out some of Eliot's weaknesses as a poet. In regard to The Waste Land, Wilson 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."[103]

Charles Powell was negative in his criticism of Eliot, calling his poems incomprehensible.[104] And the writers of Time magazine were similarly baffled by a challenging poem like The Waste Land.[105] John Crowe Ransom wrote negative criticisms of Eliot's work but also had positive things to say. 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.[106]

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... [however] a closer view of the poem does more than illuminate the difficulties; it reveals the hidden form of the work, [and] indicates how each thing falls into place."[107]

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 in 1989, the writer Cynthia Ozick refers to this peak of influence (from the 1940s through the early 1960s) as "the Age of Eliot" when Eliot "seemed pure zenith, a colossus, nothing less than a permanent luminary, fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon".[108] But during this post-war period, others, like Ronald Bush, observed that this time also marked the beginning of the decline in Eliot's literary influence:

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.[1]

Bush also notes that Eliot's reputation "slipped" significantly further after his death. He writes, "Sometimes regarded as too academic (William Carlos Williams's view), Eliot 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 1988 was a strong indication of the intimidating continued presence of his poetic voice."[1]

Literary scholars, such as Harold Bloom[109] and Stephen Greenblatt,[110] acknowledge Eliot's poetry 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. [However] his range as a poet [was] limited, and his interest in the great middle ground of human experience (as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner) [was] deficient." Despite this criticism, these scholars also acknowledge "[Eliot's] poetic cunning, his fine craftsmanship, his original accent, his historical and representative importance as the poet of the modern symbolist-Metaphysical tradition".[110]

Antisemitism edit

The depiction of Jews in some of Eliot's poems has led several critics to accuse him of antisemitism, most forcefully in Anthony Julius' book T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996).[111][112] In "Gerontion", Eliot writes, in the voice of the poem's elderly narrator, "And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner [of my building] / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp."[113] Another example appears in the poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" in which Eliot wrote, "The rats are underneath the piles. / The jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs."[114] Julius writes: "The anti-Semitism is unmistakable. It reaches out like a clear signal to the reader." Julius' viewpoint has been supported by Harold Bloom,[115] Christopher Ricks,[116] George Steiner,[116] Tom Paulin[117] and James Fenton.[116]

In lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933 (published in 1934 under the title After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy), Eliot 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."[118] Eliot never re-published this book/lecture.[116] In his 1934 pageant play The Rock, Eliot distances himself from Fascist movements of the 1930s by caricaturing Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts, who "firmly refuse/ To descend to palaver with anthropoid Jews".[119] The "new evangels"[119] of totalitarianism are presented as antithetic to the spirit of Christianity.

In In Defence of T. S. Eliot (2001) and T. S. Eliot (2006), Craig Raine sought to defend Eliot from the charge of anti-Semitism. Paul Dean was not convinced by Raine's argument. Nevertheless, Dean concluded, "Ultimately, as both Raine and, to do him justice, Julius insist, however much Eliot may have been compromised as a person, as we all are in our several ways, his greatness as a poet remains."[116] Critic Terry Eagleton also questioned the entire basis for Raine's book, writing, "Why do critics feel a need to defend the authors they write on, like doting parents deaf to all criticism of their obnoxious children? 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."[120]

Influence edit

Eliot influenced many poets, novelists, and songwriters, including Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Díreáin, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Bob Dylan, Hart Crane, William Gaddis, Allen Tate, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Trevor Nunn, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Russell Kirk,[121] George Seferis (who in 1936 published a modern Greek translation of The Waste Land) and James Joyce.[dubious ][122] T. S. Eliot was a strong influence on 20th-century Caribbean poetry written in English, including the epic Omeros (1990) by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott,[123] and Islands (1969) by Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite.[124]

Honours and awards edit

Below is a partial list of honours and awards received by Eliot or bestowed or created in his honour.

National or state honours edit

These honours are displayed in order of precedence based on Eliot's nationality and rules of protocol, not awarding date.

National or State Honours
  Order of Merit United Kingdom 1948[125][126]
  Presidential Medal of Freedom United States 1964
  Officier de la Légion d'honneur France 1951
  Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres France 1960

Literary awards edit

Drama awards edit

Music awards edit

Academic awards edit

Other honours edit

Works edit

Source: . nobelprize.org. Archived from the original on 7 November 2012.

Earliest works edit

  • Prose
    • "The Birds of Prey" (a short story; 1905)[132]
    • "A Tale of a Whale" (a short story; 1905)
    • "The Man Who Was King" (a short story; 1905)[133]
    • "The Wine and the Puritans" (review, 1909)
    • "The Point of View" (1909)
    • "Gentlemen and Seamen" (1909)
    • "Egoist" (review, 1909)
  • Poems
    • "A Fable for Feasters" (1905)
    • "[A Lyric:]'If Time and Space as Sages say'" (1905)
    • "[At Graduation 1905]" (1905)
    • "Song: 'If space and time, as sages say'" (1907)
    • "Before Morning" (1908)
    • "Circe's Palace" (1908)
    • "Song: 'When we came home across the hill'" (1909)
    • "On a Portrait" (1909)
    • "Song: 'The moonflower opens to the moth'" (1909)[134]
    • "Nocturne" (1909)
    • "Humoresque" (1910)
    • "Spleen" (1910)
    • "[Class] Ode" (1910)
    • "The Death of Saint Narcissus" (c. 1911-15)[134]

Poetry edit

Plays edit

Non-fiction edit

  • Christianity & Culture (1939, 1948)
  • The Second-Order Mind (1920)
  • Tradition and the Individual Talent (1920)
  • The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920)
  • Homage to John Dryden (1924)
  • Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1928)
  • For Lancelot Andrewes (1928)
  • Dante (1929)
  • Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932)
  • The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
  • After Strange Gods (1934)
  • Elizabethan Essays (1934)
  • Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)
  • The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)
  • A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941) made by Eliot, with an essay on Rudyard Kipling
  • Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948)
  • Poetry and Drama (1951)
  • The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)
  • The Frontiers of Criticism (1956)
  • On Poetry and Poets (1943)

Posthumous publications edit

  • To Criticize the Critic (1965)
  • Poems Written in Early Youth (1967)
  • The Waste Land: Facsimile Edition (1974)
  • Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 (1996)

Critical editions edit

  • Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (1963), excerpt and text search
  • Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Illustrated Edition (1982), excerpt and text search
  • Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode (1975), excerpt and text search
  • The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions), edited by Michael North (2000) excerpt and text search
  • The Poems of T.S. Eliot, volume 1 (Collected & Uncollected Poems) and volume 2 (Practical Cats & Further Verses), edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue (2015), Faber & Faber
  • Selected Essays (1932); enlarged (1960)
  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, Volume 1: 1898–1922 (1988, revised 2009)
  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, Volume 2: 1923–1925 (2009)
  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 3: 1926–1927 (2012)
  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 4: 1928–1929 (2013)
  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 5: 1930–1931 (2014)
  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 6: 1932–1933 (2016)
  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 7: 1934–1935 (2017)
  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 8: 1936–1938 (2019)
  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Volume 9: 1939–1941 (2021)

Notes edit

  1. ^ a b c d e f Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, via [1] 2022-04-17 at the Wayback Machine
  2. ^ "T.S. Eliot | Biography, Poems, Works, Importance, & Facts | Britannica". Britannica.com. Retrieved 12 April 2023.
  3. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 20 April 2021.
  4. ^ Sanna, Ellyn (2003). "Biography of T. S. Eliot". In Bloom, Harold (ed.). T.S. Eliot. Bloom's Biocritiques. Broomall: Chelsea House Publishing. pp. (3–44) 30.
  5. ^ Eliot, T. S. (21 December 2010). The Waste Land and Other Poems. Broadview Press. p. 133. ISBN 978-1-77048-267-8. Retrieved 9 July 2017. (citing an unsigned review in Literary World. 5 July 1917, vol. lxxxiii, 107.)
  6. ^ a b c d e f g h i "Thomas Stearns Eliot", Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 7 November 2009.
  7. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948". Nobel Foundation. Retrieved 26 April 2013.
  8. ^ a b "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 – T.S. Eliot", Nobel Foundation, taken from Frenz, Horst (ed). Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901–1967. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969. Retrieved 6 March 2012.
  9. ^ Bush, Ronald (1991). T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History. New York. p. 72. ISBN 978-0-52139-074-3.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  10. ^ Worthen, John (2009). T.S. Eliot: A Short Biography. London: Haus Publishing. p. 9.
  11. ^ Sencourt, Robert (1971). T.S. Eliot, A Memoir. London: Garnstone Limited. p. 18.
  12. ^ Letter to Marquis Childs quoted in St. Louis Post Dispatch (15 October 1930) and in the address "American Literature and the American Language" delivered at Washington University in St. Louis (9 June 1953), published in Washington University Studies, New Series: Literature and Language, no. 23 (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1953), pg. 6.
  13. ^ Hall, Donald (Spring–Summer 1959). "The Art of Poetry No. 1". The Paris Review (21). Retrieved 29 November 2011.
  14. ^ a b c Gallup, Donald (1969). T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography (A Revised and Extended ed.). New York City: Harcourt, Brace & World. p. 195. ASIN B000TM4Z00.
  15. ^ Eliot, T. S. (1967). Hayward, John Davy (ed.). Poems Written in Early Youth. New York City: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp. 33–34.
  16. ^ Narita, Tatsushi (November 1994). "The Young T. S. Eliot and Alien Cultures: His Philippine Interactions". The Review of English Studies. 45 (180): 523–525. doi:10.1093/res/XLV.180.523.
  17. ^ Narita, Tatsushi (2013). T. S. Eliot, The World Fair of St. Louis and "Autonomy". Nagoya, Japan: Kougaku Shuppan. pp. 9–104. ISBN 9784903742212.
  18. ^ Bush, Ronald (1995). "The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/ Literary Politics". In Barkan, Elzar; Bush, Ronald (eds.). Prehistories of the Future. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. pp. 3–5, 25–31.
  19. ^ Marsh, Alex; Daumer, Elizabeth (2005). "Pound and T. S. Eliot". American Literary Scholarship. p. 182.
  20. ^ Literary St. Louis. Associates of St. Louis University Libraries, Inc. and Landmarks Association of St. Louis, Inc. 1969.
  21. ^ Miller, James Edwin (2001). T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922. State College, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 62. ISBN 0271027622.
  22. ^ a b Kermode, Frank. "Introduction" to The Waste Land and Other Poems, Penguin Classics, 2003.
  23. ^ Davis, Garrick (2008). Praising it New: The Best of the New Criticism. Swallow Press/Ohio University Press. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-8040-1108-2. A year after Eliot moved to London in 1914, he was introduced to Ezra Pound through a mutual friend, Conrad Aiken. Pound and Eliot soon became lifelong friends and literary allies.
  24. ^ Perl, Jeffry M., and Andrew P. Tuck. "The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the Significance of T. S. Eliot's Indic Studies", Philosophy East & West V. 35, No. 2, April 1985, pp. 116–131.
  25. ^ a b c "Statement by T. S. Eliot on the opening of the Emily Hale letters at Princeton". T. S. Eliot. 2 January 2020. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  26. ^ a b Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, Knopf Publishing Group, pg. 1
  27. ^ Worthen, John (2009). T.S. Eliot: A Short Biography. London: Haus Publishing. pp. 34–36.
  28. ^ "Notable Birkbeckians". Birkbeck. Retrieved 6 February 2023.
  29. ^ For a reading of the dissertation, see Brazeal, Gregory (Fall 2007). "The Alleged Pragmatism of T.S. Eliot". Philosophy and Literature. 31 (1): 248–264. SSRN 1738642.
  30. ^ Skemer, Don (16 May 2017). "Sealed Treasure: T. S. Eliot Letters to Emily Hale". PUL Manuscripts News. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  31. ^ Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898–1922. p. 75.
  32. ^ Richardson, John, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters. Random House, 2001, p. 20.
  33. ^ Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. Knopf Publishing Group, 2001, p. 17.
  34. ^ The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898–1922. London: Faber and Faber. 1988. p. 533.
  35. ^ a b Poirier, Richard (3 April 2003). "In the Hyacinth Garden". London Review of Books. 25 (7).
  36. ^ Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898–1922. London: Faber and Faber. 1988. p. xvii.
  37. ^ Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. pp. 492–495.
  38. ^ Kojecky, Roger (1972). T. S. Eliot's Social Criticism. Faber & Faber. p. 55. ISBN 978-0571096923.
  39. ^ Jason Harding (31 March 2011). T. S. Eliot in Context. Cambridge University Press. p. 73. ISBN 978-1-139-50015-9. Retrieved 26 October 2017.
  40. ^ F B Pinion (27 August 1986). A T.S. Eliot Companion: Life and Works. Palgrave Macmillan UK. p. 32. ISBN 978-1-349-07449-5. Retrieved 26 October 2017.
  41. ^ a b c d T.S. Eliot. Voices and Visions Series. New York Center of Visual History: PBS, 1988.[2]
  42. ^ Boyagoda, Randy (21 July 2015). "T.S. Eliot, American". The American Conservative.
  43. ^ Plaque on interior wall of Saint Stephen's
  44. ^ Obituary notice in Church and King, Vol. XVII, No. 4, 28 February 1965, pg. 3.
  45. ^ Specific quote is "The general point of view [of the essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion", in preface by T. S. Eliot to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on style and order (1929).
  46. ^ , Time, 25 May 1936.
  47. ^ Eliot, T. S. (1986). On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber & Faber. p. 209. ISBN 978-0571089833.
  48. ^ Radio interview on 26 September 1959, Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, as cited in Wilson, Colin (1988). Beyond the Occult. London: Bantam Press. pp. 335–336.
  49. ^ Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. Constable 2001, p. 561.
  50. ^ Helmore, Edward (2 January 2020). "TS Eliot's hidden love letters reveal intense, heartbreaking affair". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  51. ^ Bush, Ronald, T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History 1991, p. 11: "Mary Trevelyan, then aged forty, was less important for Eliot's writing. Where Emily Hale and Vivienne were part of Eliot's private phantasmagoria, Mary Trevelyan played her part in what was essentially a public friendship. She was Eliot's escort for nearly twenty years until his second marriage in 1957. A brainy woman, with the bracing organizational energy of a Florence Nightingale, she propped the outer structure of Eliot's life, but for him she, too, represented .."
  52. ^ Surette, Leon, The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Humanism, 2008, p. 343: "Later, sensible, efficient Mary Trevelyan served her long stint as support during the years of penitence. For her their friendship was a commitment; for Eliot quite peripheral. His passion for immortality was so commanding that it allowed him to ..."
  53. ^ Haldar, Santwana, T. S. Eliot – A Twenty-first Century View 2005, p. xv: "Details of Eliot's friendship with Emily Hale, who was very close to him in his Boston days and with Mary Trevelyan, who wanted to marry him and left a riveting memoir of Eliot's most inscrutable years of fame, shed new light on this period in...."
  54. ^ "Valerie Eliot", The Daily Telegraph, 11 November 2012. Retrieved 1 July 2017.
  55. ^ Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. Norton 1998, p. 455.
  56. ^ "Marriage. Mr T. S. Eliot and Miss E. V. Fletcher". The Times. No. 53736. 11 January 1957. p. 10. ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 3 March 2020.
  57. ^ Gordon, Jane. "The University of Verse", The New York Times, 16 October 2005; Wesleyan University Press timeline 1 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine, 1957.
  58. ^ Lawless, Jill (11 November 2012). "T.S. Eliot's widow Valerie Eliot dies at 86". Associated Press via Yahoo News. Retrieved 12 November 2012.
  59. ^ Grantq, Michael (1997). T.S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage, Volume 1. Psychology Press. p. 55. ISBN 9780415159470.
  60. ^ McSmith, Andy (16 March 2010). "Famous names whose final stop was Golders Green crematorium". The Independent. Archived from the original on 26 May 2022. Retrieved 3 January 2018.
  61. ^ Premier (2014). "National Poetry Day on Premier 2013 – Premier". Premier. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  62. ^ Jenkins, Simon (6 April 2007). "East Coker does not deserve the taint of TS Eliot's narcissistic gloom". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 January 2018.
  63. ^ "Thomas Stearns Eliot". westminster-abbey.org. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
  64. ^ "T. S. Eliot Blue Plaque". openplaques.org. Retrieved 23 November 2013.
  65. ^ Eliot, T. S. "Letter to J. H. Woods, April 21, 1919." The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. I. Valerie Eliot (ed.), New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988, p. 285.
  66. ^ "T. S. Eliot: The Harvard Advocate Poems". Theworld.com. Retrieved 3 August 2009.
  67. ^ Elot, T.S. (Spring–Summer 1959). "The Art of Poetry No. 1". The Paris Review (Interview). Interviewed by Donald Hall. (PDF) from the original on 3 October 2009.
  68. ^ Kearns, Cleo McNelly (1987). T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-52132-439-7. Retrieved 8 March 2016.
  69. ^ Mertens, Richard. "Letter By Letter" in The University of Chicago Magazine (August 2001). Retrieved 23 April 2007.
  70. ^ See, for example, Eliot, T. S. (21 December 2010). The Waste Land and Other Poems. Broadview Press. p. 133. ISBN 978-1-77048-267-8. Retrieved 27 February 2019. (citing an unsigned review in Literary World. 5 July 1917, vol. lxxxiii, 107.)
  71. ^ Waugh, Arthur. "The New Poetry", Quarterly Review, October 1916, p. 226, citing the Times Literary Supplement 21 June 1917, no. 805, 299; Wagner, Erica (2001), "An eruption of fury", The Guardian, letters to the editor, 4 September 2001. Wagner omits the word "very" from the quote.
  72. ^ Miller, James H. Jr. (2005). T. S. Eliot: the making of an American poet, 1888–1922. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 387–388. ISBN 978-0-271-02681-7.
  73. ^ Ackroyd, Peter (1984). T. S. Eliot. New York: Simon and Schuster. p. 113. OL 24766653M.
  74. ^ The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1, p. 596.
  75. ^ Lewis, Pericles (2007). The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 129. ISBN 9780521828093. OL 22749928M.
  76. ^ The Poems of T.S. Eliot, Volume 1: Collected & Uncollected Poems. Edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, Faber & Faber, 2015, p. 576
  77. ^ MacCabe, Colin. T. S. Eliot. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2006.
  78. ^ Tearle, Oliver (4 February 2021). "10 of the Most Famous Lines by T. S. Eliot". Interesting Literature. Retrieved 3 February 2024.
  79. ^ Wilson, Edmund. "Review of Ash Wednesday", New Republic, 20 August 1930.
  80. ^ See, for instance, the biographically oriented work of one of Eliot's editors and major critics, Ronald Schuchard.
  81. ^ Grant, Michael (ed.). T. S. Eliot: the Critical Heritage. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
  82. ^ " 'Ulysses', Order, and Myth", Selected Essays T. S. Eliot (orig 1923).
  83. ^ Raine, Craig. T. S. Eliot (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)
  84. ^ Untermeyer, Louis. Modern American Poetry. Hartcourt Brace, 1950, pp. 395–396.
  85. ^ "An introduction to Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats". The British Library. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  86. ^ "The complete simplicity of T. S. Eliot". Joshua Spodek. 22 December 2013. Retrieved 7 November 2020. Little Gidding (the element of fire) is the most anthologized of the Quartets.
  87. ^ a b Newman, Barbara (2011). "Eliot's Affirmative Way: Julian of Norwich, Charles Williams, and Little Gidding". Modern Philology. 108 (3): 427–461. doi:10.1086/658355. ISSN 0026-8232. JSTOR 10.1086/658355. S2CID 162999145.
  88. ^ Eliot, T. S. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Harvard University Press, 1933 (penultimate paragraph).
  89. ^ Darlington, W. A. (2004). "Henry Sherek". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36063. Retrieved 27 July 2014. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  90. ^ T. S. Eliot at the Institute for Advanced Study, The Institute Letter, Spring 2007, p. 6.
  91. ^ Eliot, Thomas Stearns 19 January 2015 at the Wayback Machine IAS profile.
  92. ^ quoted in Roger Kimball, "A Craving for Reality", The New Criterion Vol. 18, 1999.
  93. ^ Eliot, T. S. (1930). "Tradition and the Individual Talent". The Sacred Wood. Bartleby.com. Retrieved 3 August 2009.
  94. ^ Dirk Weidmann: And I Tiresias have foresuffered all.... In: LITERATURA 51 (3), 2009, pp. 98–108.
  95. ^ a b Eliot, T. S. (1921). "Hamlet and His Problems". The Sacred Wood. Bartleby.com. Retrieved 3 August 2009.
  96. ^ Burt, Steven and Lewin, Jennifer. "Poetry and the New Criticism". A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Neil Roberts, ed. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. p. 154
  97. ^ Baker, Christopher Paul (2003). "Porphyro's Rose: Keats and T.S. Eliot's "The Metaphysical Poets"". Journal of Modern Literature. 27 (1): 57–62. doi:10.1353/jml.2004.0051. S2CID 162044168. Project MUSE 171830.
  98. ^ Malloch, A. E. (1953). "The Unified Sensibility and Metaphysical Poetry". College English. 15 (2): 95–101. doi:10.2307/371487. JSTOR 371487. S2CID 149839426.
  99. ^ Eliot, T. S. (1922). "The Waste Land". Bartleby.com. Retrieved 3 August 2009.
  100. ^ "T. S. Eliot :: The Waste Land And Criticism". Encyclopædia Britannica. 4 January 1965. Retrieved 3 August 2009.
  101. ^ Eliot, T. S. (1 January 2000). Poetry And Drama. Faber And Faber Limited. Retrieved 26 January 2017 – via Internet Archive.
  102. ^ Eliot, T. S. (1921). "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama". The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. bartleby.com. Retrieved 26 January 2017.
  103. ^ a b Wilson, Edmund, "The Poetry of Drouth". The Dial 73. December 1922. 611–16.
  104. ^ Powell, Charles, "So Much Waste Paper". Manchester Guardian, 31 October 1923.
  105. ^ Time, 3 March 1923, 12.
  106. ^ Ransom, John Crowe. "Waste Lands". New York Evening Post Literary Review, 14 July 1923, pp. 825–26.
  107. ^ Seldes, Gilbert. "T. S. Eliot". Nation, 6 December 1922. 614–616.
  108. ^ Ozick, Cynthia (20 November 1989). "T.S. ELIOT AT 101". The New Yorker. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
  109. ^ Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: Books and Schools of the Ages. NY: Riverhead, 1995.
  110. ^ a b Stephen Greenblatt, et al. (eds), The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. "T.S. Eliot". New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co.: NY, NY, 2000.
  111. ^ Gross, John. Was T.S. Eliot a Scoundrel?, Commentary magazine, November 1996
  112. ^ Anthony, Julius. T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Cambridge University Press, 1996 ISBN 0-521-58673-9
  113. ^ Eliot, T. S. "Gerontion". Collected Poems. Harcourt, 1963.
  114. ^ Eliot, T. S. "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar". Collected Poems. Harcourt, 1963.
  115. ^ Bloom, Harold (7 May 2010). "The Jewish Question: British Anti-Semitism". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 April 2012.
  116. ^ a b c d e Dean, Paul (April 2007). "Academimic: on Craig Raine's T.S. Eliot". The New Criterion. Retrieved 7 June 2011.
  117. ^ Paulin, Tom (9 May 1996). "Undesirable". London Review of Books.
  118. ^ Kirk, Russell (Fall 1997). "T. S. Eliot on Literary Morals: On T. S. Eliot's After Strange Gods". Touchstone Magazine. Vol. 10, no. 4.
  119. ^ a b T.S. Eliot, The Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 44.
  120. ^ Eagleton, Terry (22 March 2007). "Raine's Sterile Thunder". Prospect.
  121. ^ . Archived from the original on 3 February 2014. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
  122. ^ Sorel, Nancy Caldwell (18 November 1995). "FIRST ENCOUNTERS : When James Joyce met TS Eliot". The Independent. Archived from the original on 26 May 2022. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
  123. ^ Washington, K. C. (6 January 2020). "Derek Walcott (1930–2017)". Retrieved 7 November 2020. Heavily influenced by the modernist poets T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Walcott became internationally prominent with the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948–1960 (1962).
  124. ^ Brathwaite, Kamau (1993). "Roots". History of the Voice. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press. p. 286.
  125. ^ "Poet T.S. Eliot Dies in London". This Day in History. Retrieved 16 February 2012.
  126. ^ McCreery, Christopher (2005). The Order of Canada: Its Origins, History, and Development. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 9780802039408.
  127. ^ "T.S. Eliot". Playbill. from the original on 3 May 2019. Retrieved 3 May 2019.
  128. ^ "The Ivors 1982". The Ivors Academy. Archived from the original on 3 May 2019. Retrieved 3 May 2019.
  129. ^ : "Instagram photo by The Phi Beta Kappa Society • Jul 15, 2015 at 7:44 pm UTC". instagram.com. Archived from the original on 23 December 2021. Retrieved 1 December 2016.
  130. ^ "Thomas Stearns Eliot". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 1 December 2022.
  131. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 1 December 2022.
  132. ^ The three short stories published in the Smith Academy Record (1905) have never been recollected in any form and have virtually been neglected.
  133. ^ As for a comparative study of this short story and Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King", see Tatsushi Narita, T. S. Eliot and his Youth as "A Literary Columbus" (Nagoya: Kougaku Shuppan, 2011), 21–30.
  134. ^ a b . Archived from the original on 28 September 2007.

Further reading edit

  • Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life (1984).
  • Adamson, Donald (ed.) and Sencourt, Robert. T. S. Eliot: A Memoir, Dodd Mead (1971).
  • Ali, Ahmed. Mr. Eliot's Penny World of Dreams: An Essay in the Interpretation of T.S. Eliot's Poetry, Published for the Lucknow University by New Book Co., Bombay, P.S. King & Staples Ltd, Westminster, London, 1942, 138 pp.
  • Asher, Kenneth T. S. Eliot and Ideology (1995).
  • Bottum, Joseph, "What T. S. Eliot Almost Believed", First Things 55 (August/September 1995): 25–30.
  • Brand, Clinton A. "The Voice of This Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T. S. Eliot", Modern Age Volume 45, Number 4; Fall 2003, conservative perspective.
  • Brown, Alec. "The Lyrical Impulse in Eliot's Poetry", Scrutiny, vol. 2.
  • Bush, Ronald. T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (1984).
  • Bush, Ronald, 'The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/ Literary Politics'. In Prehistories of the Future, ed. Elzar Barkan and Ronald Bush, Stanford University Press (1995).
  • Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot (1987).
  • Crawford, Robert. Young Eliot: From St Louis to "The Waste Land" (2015).
  • Crawford, Robert. Eliot. After The Waste Land (2022).
  • Christensen, Karen. "Dear Mrs. Eliot", The Guardian Review (29 January 2005).
  • Das, Jolly. 'Eliot's Prismatic Plays: A Multifaceted Quest'. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2007.
  • Dawson, J. L., P. D. Holland & D. J. McKitterick, A Concordance to "The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot" Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995.
  • Forster, E. M. Essay on T. S. Eliot, in Life and Letters, June 1929.
  • Gardner, Helen. The Art of T. S. Eliot (1949).
  • Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1998).
  • Guha, Chinmoy. Where the Dreams Cross: T. S. Eliot and French Poetry (2000, 2011).
  • Harding, W. D. T. S. Eliot, 1925–1935, Scrutiny, September 1936: A Review.
  • Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. University Press of Mississippi (1978).
  • Hearn, Sheila G., Tradition and the Individual Scot]: Edwin Muir & T.S. Eliot, in Cencrastus No. 13, Summer 1983, pp. 21–24, ISSN 0264-0856
  • Hearn, Sheila G. T. S. Eliot's Parisian Year. University Press of Florida (2009).
  • Julius, Anthony. T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Cambridge University Press (1995).
  • Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (1969).
  • Kenner, Hugh. editor, T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (1962).
  • Kirk, Russell Eliot and His Age: T. S, Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century (Introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr.). Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Republication of the revised second edition, 2008.
  • Kojecky, Roger. T.S. Eliot's Social Criticism, Faber & Faber, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1972, revised Kindle edn. 2014.
  • Lal, P. (editor), T. S. Eliot: Homage from India: A Commemoration Volume of 55 Essays & Elegies, Writer's Workshop Calcutta, 1965.
  • The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Valerie Eliot. Vol. I, 1898–1922. San Diego [etc.], 1988. Vol. 2, 1923–1925. Edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, London: Faber, 2009. ISBN 978-0-571-14081-7
  • Levy, William Turner and Victor Scherle. Affectionately, T. S. Eliot: The Story of a Friendship: 1947–1965 (1968).
  • Matthews, T. S. Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot (1973)
  • Maxwell, D. E. S. The Poetry of T. S. Eliot, Routledge and Kegan Paul (1960).
  • Miller, James E., Jr. T. S. Eliot. The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005.
  • North, Michael (ed.) The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions). New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.
  • Raine, Craig. T. S. Eliot. Oxford University Press (2006).
  • Ricks, Christopher.T. S. Eliot and Prejudice (1988).
  • Robinson, Ian "The English Prophets", The Brynmill Press Ltd (2001)
  • Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (1999).
  • Scofield, Dr. Martin, "T.S. Eliot: The Poems", Cambridge University Press (1988).
  • Seferis, George; Matthias, Susan (2009). "Introduction to T. S. Eliot by George Seferis". Modernism/Modernity. 16 (1): 146–160. doi:10.1353/mod.0.0068. S2CID 143631556. Project MUSE 258704.
  • Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot (2001).
  • Sinha, Arun Kumar and Vikram, Kumar. T. S. Eliot: An Intensive Study of Selected Poems, New Delhi: Spectrum Books Pvt. Ltd (2005).
  • Spender, Stephen. T. S. Eliot (1975)
  • Spurr, Barry, Anglo-Catholic in Religion: T. S. Eliot and Christianity, The Lutterworth Press (2009)
  • Tate, Allen, editor. T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work (1966; republished by Penguin, 1971).

External links edit

Biography edit

Works edit

  • Works by T. S. Eliot in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
  • Works by T. S. Eliot at Project Gutenberg
  • Works by T. S. (Thomas Stearns) Eliot at Faded Page (Canada)
  • Works by or about T. S. Eliot at Internet Archive
  • Works by T. S. Eliot at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)  
  • official listing of T. S. Eliot's works with some available in full
  • doollee.com listing of T S Eliot's works written for the stage 22 November 2016 at the Wayback Machine
  • Poems by T.S. Eliot and biography at PoetryFoundation.org
  • Text of early poems (1907–1910) printed in The Harvard Advocate
  • T. S. Eliot Collection at Bartleby.com
  • T.S. Eliot's Cats
  • The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Knopf, 1921. Via HathiTrust.

Websites edit

  • T. S. Eliot Society (UK) Resource Hub
  • T. S. Eliot Hypertext Project
  • Official (T. S. Eliot Estate) site
  • T. S. Eliot Society (US) Home Page

Archives edit

Miscellaneous edit

  • Links to audio recordings of Eliot reading his work
  • An interview with Eliot: Donald Hall (Spring–Summer 1959). "T. S. Eliot, The Art of Poetry No. 1". The Paris Review. Spring-Summer 1959 (21).
  • audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses
  • T S Eliot at the British Library
  • Newspaper clippings about T. S. Eliot in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW

eliot, other, people, named, thomas, eliot, thomas, eliot, disambiguation, thomas, stearns, eliot, september, 1888, january, 1965, poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary, critic, editor, considered, 20th, century, greatest, poets, well, central, figur. For other people named Thomas Eliot see Thomas Eliot disambiguation Thomas Stearns Eliot OM 26 September 1888 4 January 1965 was a poet essayist publisher playwright literary critic and editor 1 He is considered to be one of the 20th century s greatest poets as well as a central figure in English language Modernist poetry His use of language writing style and verse structure reinvigorated English poetry He is also noted for his critical essays which often reevaluated long held cultural beliefs 2 T S EliotOMEliot in 1934 by Lady Ottoline MorrellBornThomas Stearns Eliot 1888 09 26 26 September 1888St Louis Missouri U S Died4 January 1965 1965 01 04 aged 76 London EnglandOccupationPoetessayistplaywrightpublishercriticCitizenshipUSA 1888 1927 UK 1927 1965 EducationHarvard University AB AM Merton College OxfordPeriod1905 1965Literary movementModernismNotable works The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock 1915 The Waste Land 1922 The Hollow Men 1925 Murder in the Cathedral 1935 Four Quartets 1943 Notable awardsNobel Prize in Literature 1948 Order of Merit 1948 SpouseVivienne Haigh Wood m 1915 sep 1932 wbr Esme Valerie Fletcher m 1957 wbr ParentsHenry Ware EliotCharlotte Champe StearnsRelativesEliot familySignatureBorn in St Louis Missouri to a prominent Boston Brahmin family he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle work and marry there 3 He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39 and renounced his American citizenship 4 Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock from 1914 to 1915 which at the time of its publication was considered outlandish 5 It was followed by The Waste Land 1922 The Hollow Men 1925 Ash Wednesday 1930 and Four Quartets 1943 6 He was also known for seven plays particularly Murder in the Cathedral 1935 and The Cocktail Party 1949 He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature for his outstanding pioneer contribution to present day poetry 7 8 Contents 1 Life 1 1 Early life and education 1 2 Marriage 1 3 Teaching banking and publishing 1 4 Conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship 1 5 Separation and remarriage 1 6 Death and honours 2 Poetry 2 1 The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock 2 2 The Waste Land 2 3 The Hollow Men 2 4 Ash Wednesday 2 5 Old Possum s Book of Practical Cats 2 6 Four Quartets 3 Plays 4 Literary criticism 5 Critical reception 5 1 Responses to his poetry 5 2 Antisemitism 6 Influence 7 Honours and awards 7 1 National or state honours 7 2 Literary awards 7 3 Drama awards 7 4 Music awards 7 5 Academic awards 7 6 Other honours 8 Works 8 1 Earliest works 8 2 Poetry 8 3 Plays 8 4 Non fiction 8 5 Posthumous publications 8 6 Critical editions 9 Notes 10 Further reading 11 External links 11 1 Biography 11 2 Works 11 3 Websites 11 4 Archives 11 5 MiscellaneousLife editEarly life and education edit The Eliots were a Boston Brahmin family with roots in England and New England Eliot s paternal grandfather William Greenleaf Eliot had moved to St Louis Missouri 6 9 to establish a Unitarian Christian church there His father Henry Ware Eliot 1843 1919 was a successful businessman president and treasurer of the Hydraulic Press Brick Company in St Louis His mother Charlotte Champe Stearns 1843 1929 who wrote poetry was a social worker which was a new profession in the U S in the early 20th century Eliot was the last of six surviving children Known to family and friends as Tom he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather Thomas Stearns Eliot s childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors First he had to overcome physical limitations as a child Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia he could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socialising with his peers As he was often isolated his love for literature developed Once he learned to read the young boy immediately became obsessed with books favouring tales of savage life the Wild West or Mark Twain s thrill seeking Tom Sawyer 10 In his memoir about Eliot his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot would often curl up in the window seat behind an enormous book setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living 11 Secondly Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision It is self evident that St Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done I feel that there is something in having passed one s childhood beside the big river which is incommunicable to those people who have not I consider myself fortunate to have been born here rather than in Boston or New York or London 12 From 1898 to 1905 Eliot attended Smith Academy the boys college preparatory division of Washington University where his studies included Latin Ancient Greek French and German He began to write poetry when he was 14 under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them 13 His first published poem A Fable For Feasters was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905 14 Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript an untitled lyric later revised and reprinted as Song in The Harvard Advocate Harvard University s student literary magazine 15 He published three short stories in 1905 Birds of Prey A Tale of a Whale and The Man Who Was King The last mentioned story reflected his exploration of the Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World s Fair of St Louis 16 17 18 His interest in indigenous peoples thus predated his anthropological studies at Harvard 19 Eliot lived in St Louis Missouri for the first 16 years of his life at the house on Locust Street where he was born After going away to school in 1905 he returned to St Louis only for vacations and visits Despite moving away from the city Eliot wrote to a friend that Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world 20 Following graduation from Smith Academy Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year where he met Scofield Thayer who later published The Waste Land He studied at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909 earning a Bachelor of Arts in an elective program similar to comparative literature in 1909 and a Master of Arts in English literature the following year 1 6 Because of his year at Milton Academy Eliot was allowed to earn his Bachelor of Arts after three years instead of the usual four 21 Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot s undergraduate career was in 1908 when he discovered Arthur Symons s The Symbolist Movement in Literature This introduced him to Jules Laforgue Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine Without Verlaine Eliot wrote he might never have heard of Tristan Corbiere and his book Les amours jaunes a work that affected the course of Eliot s life 22 The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken the American writer and critic 23 After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910 Eliot moved to Paris where from 1910 to 1911 he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Henri Alban Fournier 6 22 From 1911 to 1914 he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit 6 24 Whilst a member of the Harvard Graduate School Eliot met and fell in love with Emily Hale 25 Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College Oxford in 1914 He first visited Marburg Germany where he planned to take a summer programme but when the First World War broke out he went to Oxford instead At the time so many American students attended Merton that the Junior Common Room proposed a motion that this society abhors the Americanization of Oxford It was defeated by two votes after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture 26 Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year s Eve 1914 I hate university towns and university people who are the same everywhere with pregnant wives sprawling children many books and hideous pictures on the walls Oxford is very pretty but I don t like to be dead 26 Escaping Oxford Eliot spent much of his time in London This city had a monumental and life altering effect on Eliot for several reasons the most significant of which was his introduction to the influential American literary figure Ezra Pound A connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on 22 September 1914 Eliot paid a visit to Pound s flat Pound instantly deemed Eliot worth watching and was crucial to Eliot s fledgling career as a poet as he is credited with promoting Eliot through social events and literary gatherings Thus according to biographer John Worthen during his time in England Eliot was seeing as little of Oxford as possible He was instead spending long periods of time in London in the company of Ezra Pound and some of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared It was Pound who helped most introducing him everywhere 27 In the end Eliot did not settle at Merton and left after a year In 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck University of London 28 In 1916 he completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F H Bradley but he failed to return for the viva voce exam 6 29 Marriage edit nbsp Vivienne Haigh Wood Eliot passport photograph from 1920Before leaving the US Eliot had told Emily Hale that he was in love with her He exchanged letters with her from Oxford during 1914 and 1915 but they did not meet again until 1927 25 30 In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914 Eliot aged 26 wrote I am very dependent upon women I mean female society 31 Less than four months later Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivienne Haigh Wood a Cambridge governess They were married at Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915 32 After a short visit alone to his family in the United States Eliot returned to London and took several teaching jobs such as lecturing at Birkbeck College University of London The philosopher Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat Some scholars have suggested that she and Russell had an affair but the allegations were never confirmed 33 The marriage seems to have been markedly unhappy in part because of Vivienne s health problems In a letter addressed to Ezra Pound she covers an extensive list of her symptoms which included a habitually high temperature fatigue insomnia migraines and colitis 34 This coupled with apparent mental instability meant that she was often sent away by Eliot and her doctors for extended periods of time in the hope of improving her health As time went on he became increasingly detached from her According to witnesses both Eliots were frequent complainers of illness physical and mental while Eliot would drink excessively and Vivienne is said to have developed a liking for opium and ether drugs prescribed for medical issues It is claimed that the couple s wearying behaviour caused some visitors to vow never to spend another evening in the company of both together 35 The couple formally separated in 1933 and in 1938 Vivienne s brother Maurice had her committed to a mental hospital against her will where she remained until her death of heart disease in 1947 When told via a phone call from the asylum that Vivienne had died unexpectedly during the night Eliot is said to have buried his face in his hands and cried out Oh God oh God 35 Their relationship became the subject of a 1984 play Tom amp Viv which in 1994 was adapted as a film of the same name In a private paper written in his sixties Eliot confessed I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England And she persuaded herself also under the influence of Ezra Pound that she would save the poet by keeping him in England To her the marriage brought no happiness To me it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land 36 Teaching banking and publishing edit nbsp A plaque at SOAS s Faber Building 24 Russell Square LondonAfter leaving Merton Eliot worked as a schoolteacher most notably at Highgate School in London where he taught French and Latin his students included John Betjeman 6 He subsequently taught at the Royal Grammar School High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire To earn extra money he wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses at University College London and Oxford In 1917 he took a position at Lloyds Bank in London working on foreign accounts On a trip to Paris in August 1920 with the artist Wyndham Lewis he met the writer James Joyce Eliot said he found Joyce arrogant and Joyce doubted Eliot s ability as a poet at the time but the two writers soon became friends with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever he was in Paris 37 Eliot and Wyndham Lewis also maintained a close friendship leading to Lewis s later making his well known portrait painting of Eliot in 1938 Charles Whibley recommended T S Eliot to Geoffrey Faber 38 In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds to become a director in the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer later Faber and Faber where he remained for the rest of his career 39 40 At Faber and Faber he was responsible for publishing distinguished English poets including W H Auden Stephen Spender Charles Madge and Ted Hughes 41 Conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship edit nbsp The Faber and Faber building where Eliot worked from 1925 to 1965 the commemorative plaque is under the right hand arch On 29 June 1927 Eliot converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism and in November that year he took British citizenship thereby renouncing his United States citizenship in the event he had not officially done so previously 42 He became a churchwarden of his parish church St Stephen s Gloucester Road London and a life member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr 43 44 He specifically identified as Anglo Catholic proclaiming himself classicist in literature royalist in politics and anglo catholic sic in religion 45 46 About 30 years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined a Catholic cast of mind a Calvinist heritage and a Puritanical temperament 47 He also had wider spiritual interests commenting that I see the path of progress for modern man in his occupation with his own self with his inner being and citing Goethe and Rudolf Steiner as exemplars of such a direction 48 One of Eliot s biographers Peter Ackroyd commented that the purposes of Eliot s conversion were two fold One the Church of England offered Eliot some hope for himself and I think Eliot needed some resting place But secondly it attached Eliot to the English community and English culture 41 Separation and remarriage edit By 1932 Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time When Harvard offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932 1933 academic year he accepted and left Vivienne in England Upon his return he arranged for a formal separation from her avoiding all but one meeting with her between his leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947 Vivienne was committed to the Northumberland House mental hospital in Woodberry Down Manor House London in 1938 and remained there until she died Although Eliot was still legally her husband he never visited her 49 From 1933 to 1946 Eliot had a close emotional relationship with Emily Hale Eliot later destroyed Hale s letters to him but Hale donated Eliot s to Princeton University Library where they were sealed following Eliot s and Hale s wishes for 50 years after both had died until 2020 50 When Eliot heard of the donation he deposited his own account of their relationship with Harvard University to be opened whenever the Princeton letters were 25 From 1938 to 1957 Eliot s public companion was Mary Trevelyan of London University who wanted to marry him and left a detailed memoir 51 52 53 From 1946 to 1957 Eliot shared a flat at 19 Carlyle Mansions Chelsea with his friend John Davy Hayward who collected and managed Eliot s papers styling himself Keeper of the Eliot Archive 54 55 Hayward also collected Eliot s pre Prufrock verse commercially published after Eliot s death as Poems Written in Early Youth When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957 Hayward retained his collection of Eliot s papers which he bequeathed to King s College Cambridge in 1965 On 10 January 1957 at the age of 68 Eliot married Esme Valerie Fletcher who was 30 In contrast to his first marriage Eliot knew Fletcher well as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August 1949 They kept their wedding secret the ceremony was held in St Barnabas Church Kensington London 56 at 6 15 am with virtually no one in attendance other than his wife s parents In the early 1960s by then in failing health Eliot worked as an editor for the Wesleyan University Press seeking new poets in Europe for publication After Eliot s death Valerie dedicated her time to preserving his legacy by editing and annotating The Letters of T S Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land 57 Valerie Eliot died on 9 November 2012 at her home in London 58 Eliot had no children with either of his wives Death and honours edit nbsp Blue plaque 3 Kensington Court Gardens Kensington London home from 1957 until his death in 1965Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London on 4 January 1965 59 and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium 60 In accordance with his wishes his ashes were taken to St Michael and All Angels Church East Coker the village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors had emigrated to America 61 A wall plaque in the church commemorates him with a quotation from his poem East Coker In my beginning is my end In my end is my beginning 62 In 1967 on the second anniversary of his death Eliot was commemorated by the placement of a large stone in the floor of Poets Corner in London s Westminster Abbey The stone cut by designer Reynolds Stone is inscribed with his life dates his Order of Merit and a quotation from his poem Little Gidding the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living 63 In 1986 a blue plaque was placed on the apartment block No 3 Kensington Court Gardens where he lived and died 64 Poetry editFor a poet of his stature Eliot produced relatively few poems He was aware of this even early in his career he wrote to J H Woods one of his former Harvard professors My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind so that each should be an event 65 Typically Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small books or pamphlets and then collected them in books His first collection was Prufrock and Other Observations 1917 In 1920 he published more poems in Ara Vos Prec London and Poems 1920 New York These had the same poems in a different order except that Ode in the British edition was replaced with Hysteria in the American edition In 1925 he collected The Waste Land and the poems in Prufrock and Poems into one volume and added The Hollow Men to form Poems 1909 1925 From then on he updated this work as Collected Poems Exceptions are Old Possum s Book of Practical Cats 1939 a collection of light verse Poems Written in Early Youth posthumously published in 1967 and consisting mainly of poems published between 1907 and 1910 in The Harvard Advocate and Inventions of the March Hare Poems 1909 1917 material Eliot never intended to have published which appeared posthumously in 1996 66 During an interview in 1959 Eliot said of his nationality and its role in his work I d say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England That I m sure of It wouldn t be what it is and I imagine it wouldn t be so good putting it as modestly as I can it wouldn t be what it is if I d been born in England and it wouldn t be what it is if I d stayed in America It s a combination of things But in its sources in its emotional springs it comes from America 67 Cleo McNelly Kearns notes in her biography that Eliot was deeply influenced by Indic traditions notably the Upanishads From the Sanskrit ending of The Waste Land to the What Krishna meant section of Four Quartets shows how much Indic religions and more specifically Hinduism made up his philosophical basic for his thought process 68 It must also be acknowledged as Chinmoy Guha showed in his book Where the Dreams Cross T S Eliot and French Poetry Macmillan 2011 that he was deeply influenced by French poets from Baudelaire to Paul Valery He himself wrote in his 1940 essay on W B Yeats The kind of poetry that I needed to teach me the use of my own voice did not exist in English at all it was only to be found in French Yeats On Poetry and Poets 1948 The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock edit Main article The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock In 1915 Ezra Pound overseas editor of Poetry magazine recommended to Harriet Monroe the magazine s founder that she should publish The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock 69 Although the character Prufrock seems to be middle aged Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only twenty two Its now famous opening lines comparing the evening sky to a patient etherised upon a table were considered shocking and offensive especially at a time when Georgian Poetry was hailed for its derivations of the nineteenth century Romantic Poets 70 The poem s structure was heavily influenced by Eliot s extensive reading of Dante and refers to a number of literary works including Hamlet and those of the French Symbolists Its reception in London can be gauged from an unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement on 21 June 1917 The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone even to himself They certainly have no relation to poetry 71 The Waste Land edit nbsp Eliot in 1923 by Lady Ottoline MorrellMain article The Waste Land In October 1922 Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion 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 72 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 73 Before the poem s publication as a book in December 1922 Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair On 15 November 1922 he wrote to Richard Aldington saying As for The Waste Land that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style 74 The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post war generation 75 Dismissing this view Eliot commented in 1931 When I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the disillusion of a generation which is nonsense I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned but that did not form part of my intention 76 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 literature a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year James Joyce s Ulysses 77 page needed Among its best known phrases are April is the cruellest month I will show you fear in a handful of dust and These fragments I have shored against my ruins 78 The Hollow Men edit Main articles The Hollow Men and The Hollow Men in popular culture The Hollow Men appeared in 1925 For the critic Edmund Wilson it marked The nadir of the phase of despair and desolation given such effective expression in The Waste Land 79 It is Eliot s major poem of the late 1920s Similar to Eliot s other works its themes are overlapping and fragmentary Post war Europe under the Treaty of Versailles which Eliot despised the difficulty of hope and religious conversion Eliot s failed marriage 80 Allen Tate perceived a shift in Eliot s method writing The mythologies disappear altogether in The Hollow Men This is a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante as anything else in Eliot s early work to say little of the modern English mythology the Old Guy Fawkes of the Gunpowder Plot or the colonial and agrarian mythos of Joseph Conrad and James George Frazer which at least for reasons of textual history echo in The Waste Land 81 The continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity that is so characteristic of his mythical method remained in fine form 82 The Hollow Men contains some of Eliot s most famous lines notably its conclusion This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper Ash Wednesday edit Main article Ash Wednesday poem Ash Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism Published in 1930 it 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 1927 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 83 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 6 84 Old Possum s Book of Practical Cats edit Main article Old Possum s Book of Practical Cats In 1939 Eliot published a book of light verse Old Possum s Book of Practical Cats Old Possum was Ezra Pound s friendly nickname for Eliot The first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover In 1954 the 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 Webber first produced in London s West End in 1981 and opening on Broadway the following year 85 Four Quartets edit Main article Four Quartets 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 6 It consists of four long poems each first published separately Burnt Norton 1936 East Coker 1940 The Dry Salvages 1941 and Little Gidding 1942 Each has five sections Although they resist easy characterisation each poem includes meditations on the nature of time in some important respect theological historical physical and its relation to the human condition Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements respectively air earth water and fire Burnt Norton is a meditative poem that begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present moment while walking through a garden focusing on images and sounds such as the bird the roses clouds and an empty pool The meditation leads the narrator to reach the still point in which there is no attempt to get anywhere or to experience place and or time instead experiencing a grace of sense In the final section the narrator contemplates the arts words and music as they relate to time The narrator focuses particularly on the poet s art of manipulating Words which strain Crack and sometimes break under the burden of time under the tension slip slide perish decay with imprecision and will not stay in place Will not stay still By comparison the narrator concludes that Love is itself unmoving Only the cause and end of movement Timeless and undesiring East Coker continues the examination of time and meaning focusing in a famous passage on the nature of language and poetry Out of darkness Eliot offers a solution I said to my soul be still and wait without hope The Dry Salvages treats the element of water via images of river and sea It strives to contain opposites The past and future Are conquered and reconciled Little Gidding the element of fire is the most anthologised of the Quartets 86 Eliot s experiences as an air raid warden in the Blitz power the poem and he imagines meeting Dante during the German bombing The beginning of the Quartets Houses Are removed destroyed had become a violent everyday experience this creates an animation where for the first time he talks of love as the driving force behind all experience From this background the Quartets end with an affirmation of Julian of Norwich All shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well 87 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 87 Plays editMain articles Sweeney Agonistes Murder in the Cathedral The Rock play The Family Reunion The Cocktail Party The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman With the important exception of Four Quartets Eliot directed much of his creative energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays in verse mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama witness his allusions to Webster Thomas Middleton William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in The Waste Land In a 1933 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 88 After The Waste Land 1922 he 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 finish the play he did publish two scenes from the piece These scenes titled Fragment of a Prologue 1926 and Fragment of an Agon 1927 were published together in 1932 as Sweeney Agonistes Although Eliot noted that this was not intended to be a one act play it is sometimes performed as one 14 A pageant play by Eliot called The Rock was performed in 1934 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 14 George Bell the Bishop of Chichester had been instrumental in connecting Eliot with producer E Martin Browne for the production of The Rock and later commissioned Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935 This one Murder in the Cathedral concerning the death of the martyr Thomas Becket was 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 41 After this he worked on more commercial plays for more general audiences The Family Reunion 1939 The Cocktail Party 1949 The Confidential Clerk 1953 and The Elder Statesman 1958 the latter three were produced by Henry Sherek and directed by E Martin Browne 89 The Broadway production in New York of The Cocktail Party received the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play Eliot wrote The Cocktail Party while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study 90 91 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 41 Literary criticism editEliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism and 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 92 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 In a peculiar sense an artist or poet must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past 93 This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist s previous works a simultaneous order of works i e tradition Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works especially on his long poem The Waste Land 94 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 95 This notion concedes that a poem means what it says but suggests that there can be a non subjective judgment based on different readers different but perhaps corollary interpretations of a work 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 Shelley his proposition that good poems constitute not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion and his insistence that poets at present must be difficult 96 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 97 98 His 1922 poem The Waste Land 99 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 World War I rather than an objective historical understanding of it 100 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 101 Hamlet and his Problems 95 and The Possibility of a Poetic Drama 102 focused on the aesthetics of writing drama in verse Critical reception editResponses to his poetry edit The writer Ronald Bush notes that Eliot s early poems like The Love Song of J 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 Conrad Aiken for example marveled at how sharp and complete and sui generis the whole thing was from the outset The wholeness is there from the very beginning 1 The initial critical response to Eliot s The Waste Land was mixed Bush notes that the piece was at first correctly perceived as a work of jazz like syncopation and like 1920s jazz essentially iconoclastic 1 Some critics like Edmund Wilson Conrad Aiken and Gilbert Seldes thought it was the best poetry being written in the English language while others thought it was esoteric and wilfully difficult Edmund Wilson being one of the critics who praised Eliot called him one of our only authentic poets 103 Wilson also pointed out some of Eliot s weaknesses as a poet In regard to The Waste Land Wilson 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 103 Charles Powell was negative in his criticism of Eliot calling his poems incomprehensible 104 And the writers of Time magazine were similarly baffled by a challenging poem like The Waste Land 105 John Crowe Ransom wrote negative criticisms of Eliot s work but also had positive things to say 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 106 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 however a closer view of the poem does more than illuminate the difficulties it reveals the hidden form of the work and indicates how each thing falls into place 107 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 in 1989 the writer Cynthia Ozick refers to this peak of influence from the 1940s through the early 1960s as the Age of Eliot when Eliot seemed pure zenith a colossus nothing less than a permanent luminary fixed in the firmament like the sun and the moon 108 But during this post war period others like Ronald Bush observed that this time also marked the beginning of the decline in Eliot s literary influence 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 1 Bush also notes that Eliot s reputation slipped significantly further after his death He writes Sometimes regarded as too academic William Carlos Williams s view Eliot 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 1988 was a strong indication of the intimidating continued presence of his poetic voice 1 Literary scholars such as Harold Bloom 109 and Stephen Greenblatt 110 acknowledge Eliot s poetry 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 However his range as a poet was limited and his interest in the great middle ground of human experience as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner was deficient Despite this criticism these scholars also acknowledge Eliot s poetic cunning his fine craftsmanship his original accent his historical and representative importance as the poet of the modern symbolist Metaphysical tradition 110 Antisemitism edit The depiction of Jews in some of Eliot s poems has led several critics to accuse him of antisemitism most forcefully in Anthony Julius book T S Eliot Anti Semitism and Literary Form 1996 111 112 In Gerontion Eliot writes in the voice of the poem s elderly narrator And the jew squats on the window sill the owner of my building Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp 113 Another example appears in the poem Burbank with a Baedeker Bleistein with a Cigar in which Eliot wrote The rats are underneath the piles The jew is underneath the lot Money in furs 114 Julius writes The anti Semitism is unmistakable It reaches out like a clear signal to the reader Julius viewpoint has been supported by Harold Bloom 115 Christopher Ricks 116 George Steiner 116 Tom Paulin 117 and James Fenton 116 In lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933 published in 1934 under the title After Strange Gods A Primer of Modern Heresy Eliot 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 118 Eliot never re published this book lecture 116 In his 1934 pageant play The Rock Eliot distances himself from Fascist movements of the 1930s by caricaturing Oswald Mosley s Blackshirts who firmly refuse To descend to palaver with anthropoid Jews 119 The new evangels 119 of totalitarianism are presented as antithetic to the spirit of Christianity In In Defence of T S Eliot 2001 and T S Eliot 2006 Craig Raine sought to defend Eliot from the charge of anti Semitism Paul Dean was not convinced by Raine s argument Nevertheless Dean concluded Ultimately as both Raine and to do him justice Julius insist however much Eliot may have been compromised as a person as we all are in our several ways his greatness as a poet remains 116 Critic Terry Eagleton also questioned the entire basis for Raine s book writing Why do critics feel a need to defend the authors they write on like doting parents deaf to all criticism of their obnoxious children 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 120 Influence editEliot influenced many poets novelists and songwriters including Sean o Riordain Mairtin o Direain Virginia Woolf Ezra Pound Bob Dylan Hart Crane William Gaddis Allen Tate Andrew Lloyd Webber Trevor Nunn Ted Hughes Geoffrey Hill Seamus Heaney F Scott Fitzgerald Russell Kirk 121 George Seferis who in 1936 published a modern Greek translation of The Waste Land and James Joyce dubious discuss 122 T S Eliot was a strong influence on 20th century Caribbean poetry written in English including the epic Omeros 1990 by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott 123 and Islands 1969 by Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite 124 Honours and awards editBelow is a partial list of honours and awards received by Eliot or bestowed or created in his honour National or state honours edit These honours are displayed in order of precedence based on Eliot s nationality and rules of protocol not awarding date National or State Honours nbsp Order of Merit United Kingdom 1948 125 126 nbsp Presidential Medal of Freedom United States 1964 nbsp Officier de la Legion d honneur France 1951 nbsp Commandeur de l Ordre des Arts et des Lettres France 1960Literary awards edit Nobel Prize in Literature for his outstanding pioneer contribution to present day poetry 1948 8 Hanseatic Goethe Prize of Hamburg 1955 Dante Medal of Florence 1959 Drama awards edit 1950 Tony Award for Best Play for the Broadway production of The Cocktail Party 1983 Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for his poems used in the musical Cats posthumous award 1983 Tony Award for Best Original Score for his poems used in the musical Cats shared with Andrew Lloyd Webber posthumous award 127 Music awards edit Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically for his poems used in the song Memory 1982 128 Academic awards edit Inducted into Phi Beta Kappa 1935 129 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1954 130 Elected to the American Philosophical Society 1960 131 Thirteen Honorary Doctorates Including ones from Oxford Cambridge the Sorbonne and Harvard Other honours edit Eliot College of the University of Kent England named in his honour Celebrated on U S commemorative postage stamps Star on the St Louis Walk of FameWorks editMain article T S Eliot bibliography Source The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 T S Eliot Bibliography nobelprize org Archived from the original on 7 November 2012 Earliest works edit Prose The Birds of Prey a short story 1905 132 A Tale of a Whale a short story 1905 The Man Who Was King a short story 1905 133 The Wine and the Puritans review 1909 The Point of View 1909 Gentlemen and Seamen 1909 Egoist review 1909 Poems A Fable for Feasters 1905 A Lyric If Time and Space as Sages say 1905 At Graduation 1905 1905 Song If space and time as sages say 1907 Before Morning 1908 Circe s Palace 1908 Song When we came home across the hill 1909 On a Portrait 1909 Song The moonflower opens to the moth 1909 134 Nocturne 1909 Humoresque 1910 Spleen 1910 Class Ode 1910 The Death of Saint Narcissus c 1911 15 134 Poetry edit Prufrock and Other Observations 1917 The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock Portrait of a Lady Preludes Rhapsody on a Windy Night Morning at the Window The Boston Evening Transcript about the Boston Evening Transcript Aunt Helen Cousin Nancy Mr Apollinax Hysteria Conversation Galante La Figlia Che Piange Poems 1920 Gerontion Burbank with a Baedeker Bleistein with a Cigar Sweeney Erect A Cooking Egg Le Directeur Melange Adultere de Tout Lune de Miel The Hippopotamus Dans le Restaurant Whispers of Immortality Mr Eliot s Sunday Morning Service Sweeney Among the Nightingales The Waste Land 1922 The Hollow Men 1925 Ariel Poems 1927 1954 Journey of the Magi 1927 A Song for Simeon 1928 Animula 1929 Marina 1930 Triumphal March 1931 The Cultivation of Christmas Trees 1954 Macavity The Mystery Cat Ash Wednesday 1930 Coriolan 1931 Old Possum s Book of Practical Cats 1939 The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs and Billy M Caw The Remarkable Parrot 1939 in The Queen s Book of the Red Cross Four Quartets 1945 Plays edit Sweeney Agonistes published in 1926 first performed in 1934 The Rock 1934 Murder in the Cathedral 1935 The Family Reunion 1939 The Cocktail Party 1949 The Confidential Clerk 1953 The Elder Statesman first performed in 1958 published in 1959 Non fiction edit Christianity amp Culture 1939 1948 The Second Order Mind 1920 Tradition and the Individual Talent 1920 The Sacred Wood Essays on Poetry and Criticism 1920 Hamlet and His Problems Homage to John Dryden 1924 Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca 1928 For Lancelot Andrewes 1928 Dante 1929 Selected Essays 1917 1932 1932 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 1933 After Strange Gods 1934 Elizabethan Essays 1934 Essays Ancient and Modern 1936 The Idea of a Christian Society 1939 A Choice of Kipling s Verse 1941 made by Eliot with an essay on Rudyard Kipling Notes Towards the Definition of Culture 1948 Poetry and Drama 1951 The Three Voices of Poetry 1954 The Frontiers of Criticism 1956 On Poetry and Poets 1943 Posthumous publications edit To Criticize the Critic 1965 Poems Written in Early Youth 1967 The Waste Land Facsimile Edition 1974 Inventions of the March Hare Poems 1909 1917 1996 Critical editions edit Collected Poems 1909 1962 1963 excerpt and text search Old Possum s Book of Practical Cats Illustrated Edition 1982 excerpt and text search Selected Prose of T S Eliot edited by Frank Kermode 1975 excerpt and text search The Waste Land Norton Critical Editions edited by Michael North 2000 excerpt and text search The Poems of T S Eliot volume 1 Collected amp Uncollected Poems and volume 2 Practical Cats amp Further Verses edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue 2015 Faber amp Faber Selected Essays 1932 enlarged 1960 The Letters of T S Eliot edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton Volume 1 1898 1922 1988 revised 2009 The Letters of T S Eliot edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton Volume 2 1923 1925 2009 The Letters of T S Eliot edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden Volume 3 1926 1927 2012 The Letters of T S Eliot edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden Volume 4 1928 1929 2013 The Letters of T S Eliot edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden Volume 5 1930 1931 2014 The Letters of T S Eliot edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden Volume 6 1932 1933 2016 The Letters of T S Eliot edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden Volume 7 1934 1935 2017 The Letters of T S Eliot edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden Volume 8 1936 1938 2019 The Letters of T S Eliot edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden Volume 9 1939 1941 2021 Notes edit a b c d e f Bush Ronald T S Eliot s Life and Career in John A Garraty and Mark C Carnes eds American National Biography New York Oxford University Press 1999 via 1 Archived 2022 04 17 at the Wayback Machine T S Eliot Biography Poems Works Importance amp Facts Britannica Britannica com Retrieved 12 April 2023 The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 NobelPrize org Retrieved 20 April 2021 Sanna Ellyn 2003 Biography of T S Eliot In Bloom Harold ed T S Eliot Bloom s Biocritiques Broomall Chelsea House Publishing pp 3 44 30 Eliot T S 21 December 2010 The Waste Land and Other Poems Broadview Press p 133 ISBN 978 1 77048 267 8 Retrieved 9 July 2017 citing an unsigned review in Literary World 5 July 1917 vol lxxxiii 107 a b c d e f g h i Thomas Stearns Eliot Encyclopaedia Britannica Retrieved 7 November 2009 The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 Nobel Foundation Retrieved 26 April 2013 a b The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 T S Eliot Nobel Foundation taken from Frenz Horst ed Nobel Lectures Literature 1901 1967 Amsterdam Elsevier Publishing Company 1969 Retrieved 6 March 2012 Bush Ronald 1991 T S Eliot The Modernist in History New York p 72 ISBN 978 0 52139 074 3 a href Template Cite book html title Template Cite book cite book a CS1 maint location missing publisher link Worthen John 2009 T S Eliot A Short Biography London Haus Publishing p 9 Sencourt Robert 1971 T S Eliot A Memoir London Garnstone Limited p 18 Letter to Marquis Childs quoted in St Louis Post Dispatch 15 October 1930 and in the address American Literature and the American Language delivered at Washington University in St Louis 9 June 1953 published in Washington University Studies New Series Literature and Language no 23 St Louis Washington University Press 1953 pg 6 Hall Donald Spring Summer 1959 The Art of Poetry No 1 The Paris Review 21 Retrieved 29 November 2011 a b c Gallup Donald 1969 T S Eliot A Bibliography A Revised and Extended ed New York City Harcourt Brace amp World p 195 ASIN B000TM4Z00 Eliot T S 1967 Hayward John Davy ed Poems Written in Early Youth New York City Farrar Straus and Giroux pp 33 34 Narita Tatsushi November 1994 The Young T S Eliot and Alien Cultures His Philippine Interactions The Review of English Studies 45 180 523 525 doi 10 1093 res XLV 180 523 Narita Tatsushi 2013 T S Eliot The World Fair of St Louis and Autonomy Nagoya Japan Kougaku Shuppan pp 9 104 ISBN 9784903742212 Bush Ronald 1995 The Presence of the Past Ethnographic Thinking Literary Politics In Barkan Elzar Bush Ronald eds Prehistories of the Future Stanford California Stanford University Press pp 3 5 25 31 Marsh Alex Daumer Elizabeth 2005 Pound and T S Eliot American Literary Scholarship p 182 Literary St Louis Associates of St Louis University Libraries Inc and Landmarks Association of St Louis Inc 1969 Miller James Edwin 2001 T S Eliot The Making of an American Poet 1888 1922 State College Pennsylvania Pennsylvania State University Press p 62 ISBN 0271027622 a b Kermode Frank Introduction to The Waste Land and Other Poems Penguin Classics 2003 Davis Garrick 2008 Praising it New The Best of the New Criticism Swallow Press Ohio University Press p 2 ISBN 978 0 8040 1108 2 A year after Eliot moved to London in 1914 he was introduced to Ezra Pound through a mutual friend Conrad Aiken Pound and Eliot soon became lifelong friends and literary allies Perl Jeffry M and Andrew P Tuck The Hidden Advantage of Tradition On the Significance of T S Eliot s Indic Studies Philosophy East amp West V 35 No 2 April 1985 pp 116 131 a b c Statement by T S Eliot on the opening of the Emily Hale letters at Princeton T S Eliot 2 January 2020 Retrieved 6 January 2020 a b Seymour Jones Carole Painted Shadow The Life of Vivienne Eliot First Wife of T S Eliot Knopf Publishing Group pg 1 Worthen John 2009 T S Eliot A Short Biography London Haus Publishing pp 34 36 Notable Birkbeckians Birkbeck Retrieved 6 February 2023 For a reading of the dissertation see Brazeal Gregory Fall 2007 The Alleged Pragmatism of T S Eliot Philosophy and Literature 31 1 248 264 SSRN 1738642 Skemer Don 16 May 2017 Sealed Treasure T S Eliot Letters to Emily Hale PUL Manuscripts News Retrieved 6 January 2020 Eliot T S The Letters of T S Eliot Volume 1 1898 1922 p 75 Richardson John Sacred Monsters Sacred Masters Random House 2001 p 20 Seymour Jones Carole Painted Shadow A Life of Vivienne Eliot Knopf Publishing Group 2001 p 17 The Letters of T S Eliot Volume 1 1898 1922 London Faber and Faber 1988 p 533 a b Poirier Richard 3 April 2003 In the Hyacinth Garden London Review of Books 25 7 Eliot T S The Letters of T S Eliot Volume 1 1898 1922 London Faber and Faber 1988 p xvii Ellmann Richard James Joyce pp 492 495 Kojecky Roger 1972 T S Eliot s Social Criticism Faber amp Faber p 55 ISBN 978 0571096923 Jason Harding 31 March 2011 T S Eliot in Context Cambridge University Press p 73 ISBN 978 1 139 50015 9 Retrieved 26 October 2017 F B Pinion 27 August 1986 A T S Eliot Companion Life and Works Palgrave Macmillan UK p 32 ISBN 978 1 349 07449 5 Retrieved 26 October 2017 a b c d T S Eliot Voices and Visions Series New York Center of Visual History PBS 1988 2 Boyagoda Randy 21 July 2015 T S Eliot American The American Conservative Plaque on interior wall of Saint Stephen s Obituary notice in Church and King Vol XVII No 4 28 February 1965 pg 3 Specific quote is The general point of view of the essays may be described as classicist in literature royalist in politics and anglo catholic sic in religion in preface by T S Eliot to For Lancelot Andrewes Essays on style and order 1929 Books Royalist Classicist Anglo Catholic Time 25 May 1936 Eliot T S 1986 On Poetry and Poets London Faber amp Faber p 209 ISBN 978 0571089833 Radio interview on 26 September 1959 Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk as cited in Wilson Colin 1988 Beyond the Occult London Bantam Press pp 335 336 Seymour Jones Carole Painted Shadow A Life of Vivienne Eliot Constable 2001 p 561 Helmore Edward 2 January 2020 TS Eliot s hidden love letters reveal intense heartbreaking affair The Guardian ISSN 0261 3077 Retrieved 6 January 2020 Bush Ronald T S Eliot The Modernist in History 1991 p 11 Mary Trevelyan then aged forty was less important for Eliot s writing Where Emily Hale and Vivienne were part of Eliot s private phantasmagoria Mary Trevelyan played her part in what was essentially a public friendship She was Eliot s escort for nearly twenty years until his second marriage in 1957 A brainy woman with the bracing organizational energy of a Florence Nightingale she propped the outer structure of Eliot s life but for him she too represented Surette Leon The Modern Dilemma Wallace Stevens T S Eliot and Humanism 2008 p 343 Later sensible efficient Mary Trevelyan served her long stint as support during the years of penitence For her their friendship was a commitment for Eliot quite peripheral His passion for immortality was so commanding that it allowed him to Haldar Santwana T S Eliot A Twenty first Century View 2005 p xv Details of Eliot s friendship with Emily Hale who was very close to him in his Boston days and with Mary Trevelyan who wanted to marry him and left a riveting memoir of Eliot s most inscrutable years of fame shed new light on this period in Valerie Eliot The Daily Telegraph 11 November 2012 Retrieved 1 July 2017 Gordon Lyndall T S Eliot An Imperfect Life Norton 1998 p 455 Marriage Mr T S Eliot and Miss E V Fletcher The Times No 53736 11 January 1957 p 10 ISSN 0140 0460 Retrieved 3 March 2020 Gordon Jane The University of Verse The New York Times 16 October 2005 Wesleyan University Press timeline Archived 1 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine 1957 Lawless Jill 11 November 2012 T S Eliot s widow Valerie Eliot dies at 86 Associated Press via Yahoo News Retrieved 12 November 2012 Grantq Michael 1997 T S Eliot The Critical Heritage Volume 1 Psychology Press p 55 ISBN 9780415159470 McSmith Andy 16 March 2010 Famous names whose final stop was Golders Green crematorium The Independent Archived from the original on 26 May 2022 Retrieved 3 January 2018 Premier 2014 National Poetry Day on Premier 2013 Premier Premier Retrieved 27 February 2018 Jenkins Simon 6 April 2007 East Coker does not deserve the taint of TS Eliot s narcissistic gloom The Guardian Retrieved 3 January 2018 Thomas Stearns Eliot westminster abbey org Retrieved 1 December 2016 T S Eliot Blue Plaque openplaques org Retrieved 23 November 2013 Eliot T S Letter to J H Woods April 21 1919 The Letters of T S Eliot vol I Valerie Eliot ed New York Harcourt Brace 1988 p 285 T S Eliot The Harvard Advocate Poems Theworld com Retrieved 3 August 2009 Elot T S Spring Summer 1959 The Art of Poetry No 1 The Paris Review Interview Interviewed by Donald Hall Archived PDF from the original on 3 October 2009 Kearns Cleo McNelly 1987 T S Eliot and Indic Traditions A Study in Poetry and Belief Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 978 0 52132 439 7 Retrieved 8 March 2016 Mertens Richard Letter By Letter in The University of Chicago Magazine August 2001 Retrieved 23 April 2007 See for example Eliot T S 21 December 2010 The Waste Land and Other Poems Broadview Press p 133 ISBN 978 1 77048 267 8 Retrieved 27 February 2019 citing an unsigned review in Literary World 5 July 1917 vol lxxxiii 107 Waugh Arthur The New Poetry Quarterly Review October 1916 p 226 citing the Times Literary Supplement 21 June 1917 no 805 299 Wagner Erica 2001 An eruption of fury The Guardian letters to the editor 4 September 2001 Wagner omits the word very from the quote Miller James H Jr 2005 T S Eliot the making of an American poet 1888 1922 University Park PA Pennsylvania State University Press pp 387 388 ISBN 978 0 271 02681 7 Ackroyd Peter 1984 T S Eliot New York Simon and Schuster p 113 OL 24766653M The Letters of T S Eliot Vol 1 p 596 Lewis Pericles 2007 The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism Cambridge Cambridge University Press p 129 ISBN 9780521828093 OL 22749928M The Poems of T S Eliot Volume 1 Collected amp Uncollected Poems Edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue Faber amp Faber 2015 p 576 MacCabe Colin T S Eliot Tavistock Northcote House 2006 Tearle Oliver 4 February 2021 10 of the Most Famous Lines by T S Eliot Interesting Literature Retrieved 3 February 2024 Wilson Edmund Review of Ash Wednesday New Republic 20 August 1930 See for instance the biographically oriented work of one of Eliot s editors and major critics Ronald Schuchard Grant Michael ed T S Eliot the Critical Heritage Routledge amp Kegan Paul 1982 Ulysses Order and Myth Selected Essays T S Eliot orig 1923 Raine Craig T S Eliot New York Oxford University Press 2006 Untermeyer Louis Modern American Poetry Hartcourt Brace 1950 pp 395 396 An introduction to Old Possum s Book of Practical Cats The British Library Retrieved 27 February 2018 The complete simplicity of T S Eliot Joshua Spodek 22 December 2013 Retrieved 7 November 2020 Little Gidding the element of fire is the most anthologized of the Quartets a b Newman Barbara 2011 Eliot s Affirmative Way Julian of Norwich Charles Williams and Little Gidding Modern Philology 108 3 427 461 doi 10 1086 658355 ISSN 0026 8232 JSTOR 10 1086 658355 S2CID 162999145 Eliot T S The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism Harvard University Press 1933 penultimate paragraph Darlington W A 2004 Henry Sherek Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online ed Oxford University Press doi 10 1093 ref odnb 36063 Retrieved 27 July 2014 Subscription or UK public library membership required T S Eliot at the Institute for Advanced Study The Institute Letter Spring 2007 p 6 Eliot Thomas Stearns Archived 19 January 2015 at the Wayback Machine IAS profile quoted in Roger Kimball A Craving for Reality The New Criterion Vol 18 1999 Eliot T S 1930 Tradition and the Individual Talent The Sacred Wood Bartleby com Retrieved 3 August 2009 Dirk Weidmann And I Tiresias have foresuffered all In LITERATURA 51 3 2009 pp 98 108 a b Eliot T S 1921 Hamlet and His Problems The Sacred Wood Bartleby com Retrieved 3 August 2009 Burt Steven and Lewin Jennifer Poetry and the New Criticism A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry Neil Roberts ed Malden Massachusetts Blackwell Publishers 2001 p 154 Baker Christopher Paul 2003 Porphyro s Rose Keats and T S Eliot s The Metaphysical Poets Journal of Modern Literature 27 1 57 62 doi 10 1353 jml 2004 0051 S2CID 162044168 Project MUSE 171830 Malloch A E 1953 The Unified Sensibility and Metaphysical Poetry College English 15 2 95 101 doi 10 2307 371487 JSTOR 371487 S2CID 149839426 Eliot T S 1922 The Waste Land Bartleby com Retrieved 3 August 2009 T S Eliot The Waste Land And Criticism Encyclopaedia Britannica 4 January 1965 Retrieved 3 August 2009 Eliot T S 1 January 2000 Poetry And Drama Faber And Faber Limited Retrieved 26 January 2017 via Internet Archive Eliot T S 1921 The Possibility of a Poetic Drama The Sacred Wood Essays on Poetry and Criticism bartleby com Retrieved 26 January 2017 a b Wilson Edmund The Poetry of Drouth The Dial 73 December 1922 611 16 Powell Charles So Much Waste Paper Manchester Guardian 31 October 1923 Time 3 March 1923 12 Ransom John Crowe Waste Lands New York Evening Post Literary Review 14 July 1923 pp 825 26 Seldes Gilbert T S Eliot Nation 6 December 1922 614 616 Ozick Cynthia 20 November 1989 T S ELIOT AT 101 The New Yorker Retrieved 1 December 2016 Bloom Harold The Western Canon Books and Schools of the Ages NY Riverhead 1995 a b Stephen Greenblatt et al eds The Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume 2 T S Eliot New York NY W W Norton amp Co NY NY 2000 Gross John Was T S Eliot a Scoundrel Commentary magazine November 1996 Anthony Julius T S Eliot Anti Semitism and Literary Form Cambridge University Press 1996 ISBN 0 521 58673 9 Eliot T S Gerontion Collected Poems Harcourt 1963 Eliot T S Burbank with a Baedeker Bleistein with a Cigar Collected Poems Harcourt 1963 Bloom Harold 7 May 2010 The Jewish Question British Anti Semitism The New York Times Retrieved 9 April 2012 a b c d e Dean Paul April 2007 Academimic on Craig Raine s T S Eliot The New Criterion Retrieved 7 June 2011 Paulin Tom 9 May 1996 Undesirable London Review of Books Kirk Russell Fall 1997 T S Eliot on Literary Morals On T S Eliot s After Strange Gods Touchstone Magazine Vol 10 no 4 a b T S Eliot The Rock London Faber and Faber 1934 44 Eagleton Terry 22 March 2007 Raine s Sterile Thunder Prospect www beingpoet com Archived from the original on 3 February 2014 Retrieved 1 December 2016 Sorel Nancy Caldwell 18 November 1995 FIRST ENCOUNTERS When James Joyce met TS Eliot The Independent Archived from the original on 26 May 2022 Retrieved 1 December 2016 Washington K C 6 January 2020 Derek Walcott 1930 2017 Retrieved 7 November 2020 Heavily influenced by the modernist poets T S Eliot and Ezra Pound Walcott became internationally prominent with the collection In a Green Night Poems 1948 1960 1962 Brathwaite Kamau 1993 Roots History of the Voice Ann Arbor Michigan University of Michigan Press p 286 Poet T S Eliot Dies in London This Day in History Retrieved 16 February 2012 McCreery Christopher 2005 The Order of Canada Its Origins History and Development University of Toronto Press ISBN 9780802039408 T S Eliot Playbill Archived from the original on 3 May 2019 Retrieved 3 May 2019 The Ivors 1982 The Ivors Academy Archived from the original on 3 May 2019 Retrieved 3 May 2019 Instagram photo by The Phi Beta Kappa Society Jul 15 2015 at 7 44 pm UTC instagram com Archived from the original on 23 December 2021 Retrieved 1 December 2016 Thomas Stearns Eliot American Academy of Arts amp Sciences Retrieved 1 December 2022 APS Member History search amphilsoc org Retrieved 1 December 2022 The three short stories published in the Smith Academy Record 1905 have never been recollected in any form and have virtually been neglected As for a comparative study of this short story and Rudyard Kipling s The Man Who Would Be King see Tatsushi Narita T S Eliot and his Youth as A Literary Columbus Nagoya Kougaku Shuppan 2011 21 30 a b T S Eliot s Harvard Advocate Poems Archived from the original on 28 September 2007 Further reading editAckroyd Peter T S Eliot A Life 1984 Adamson Donald ed and Sencourt Robert T S Eliot A Memoir Dodd Mead 1971 Ali Ahmed Mr Eliot s Penny World of Dreams An Essay in the Interpretation of T S Eliot s Poetry Published for the Lucknow University by New Book Co Bombay P S King amp Staples Ltd Westminster London 1942 138 pp Asher Kenneth T S Eliot and Ideology 1995 Bottum Joseph What T S Eliot Almost Believed First Things 55 August September 1995 25 30 Brand Clinton A The Voice of This Calling The Enduring Legacy of T S Eliot Modern Age Volume 45 Number 4 Fall 2003 conservative perspective Brown Alec The Lyrical Impulse in Eliot s Poetry Scrutiny vol 2 Bush Ronald T S Eliot A Study in Character and Style 1984 Bush Ronald The Presence of the Past Ethnographic Thinking Literary Politics In Prehistories of the Future ed Elzar Barkan and Ronald Bush Stanford University Press 1995 Crawford Robert The Savage and the City in the Work of T S Eliot 1987 Crawford Robert Young Eliot From St Louis to The Waste Land 2015 Crawford Robert Eliot After The Waste Land 2022 Christensen Karen Dear Mrs Eliot The Guardian Review 29 January 2005 Das Jolly Eliot s Prismatic Plays A Multifaceted Quest New Delhi Atlantic 2007 Dawson J L P D Holland amp D J McKitterick A Concordance to The Complete Poems and Plays of T S Eliot Ithaca amp London Cornell University Press 1995 Forster E M Essay on T S Eliot in Life and Letters June 1929 Gardner Helen The Art of T S Eliot 1949 Gordon Lyndall T S Eliot An Imperfect Life 1998 Guha Chinmoy Where the Dreams Cross T S Eliot and French Poetry 2000 2011 Harding W D T S Eliot 1925 1935 Scrutiny September 1936 A Review Hargrove Nancy Duvall Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T S Eliot University Press of Mississippi 1978 Hearn Sheila G Tradition and the Individual Scot Edwin Muir amp T S Eliot in Cencrastus No 13 Summer 1983 pp 21 24 ISSN 0264 0856 Hearn Sheila G T S Eliot s Parisian Year University Press of Florida 2009 Julius Anthony T S Eliot Anti Semitism and Literary Form Cambridge University Press 1995 Kenner Hugh The Invisible Poet T S Eliot 1969 Kenner Hugh editor T S Eliot A Collection of Critical Essays Prentice Hall 1962 Kirk Russell Eliot and His Age T S Eliot s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century Introduction by Benjamin G Lockerd Jr Wilmington Intercollegiate Studies Institute Republication of the revised second edition 2008 Kojecky Roger T S Eliot s Social Criticism Faber amp Faber Farrar Straus Giroux 1972 revised Kindle edn 2014 Lal P editor T S Eliot Homage from India A Commemoration Volume of 55 Essays amp Elegies Writer s Workshop Calcutta 1965 The Letters of T S Eliot Ed Valerie Eliot Vol I 1898 1922 San Diego etc 1988 Vol 2 1923 1925 Edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton London Faber 2009 ISBN 978 0 571 14081 7 Levy William Turner and Victor Scherle Affectionately T S Eliot The Story of a Friendship 1947 1965 1968 Matthews T S Great Tom Notes Towards the Definition of T S Eliot 1973 Maxwell D E S The Poetry of T S Eliot Routledge and Kegan Paul 1960 Miller James E Jr T S Eliot The Making of an American Poet 1888 1922 The Pennsylvania State University Press 2005 North Michael ed The Waste Land Norton Critical Editions New York W W Norton 2000 Raine Craig T S Eliot Oxford University Press 2006 Ricks Christopher T S Eliot and Prejudice 1988 Robinson Ian The English Prophets The Brynmill Press Ltd 2001 Schuchard Ronald Eliot s Dark Angel Intersections of Life and Art 1999 Scofield Dr Martin T S Eliot The Poems Cambridge University Press 1988 Seferis George Matthias Susan 2009 Introduction to T S Eliot by George Seferis Modernism Modernity 16 1 146 160 doi 10 1353 mod 0 0068 S2CID 143631556 Project MUSE 258704 Seymour Jones Carole Painted Shadow A Life of Vivienne Eliot 2001 Sinha Arun Kumar and Vikram Kumar T S Eliot An Intensive Study of Selected Poems New Delhi Spectrum Books Pvt Ltd 2005 Spender Stephen T S Eliot 1975 Spurr Barry Anglo Catholic in Religion T S Eliot and Christianity The Lutterworth Press 2009 Tate Allen editor T S Eliot The Man and His Work 1966 republished by Penguin 1971 External links editT S Eliot at Wikipedia s sister projects nbsp Media from Commons nbsp Quotations from Wikiquote nbsp Texts from Wikisource Biography edit T S Eliot at the Poetry Foundation Biography From T S Eliot Lives and Legacies Archived 14 February 2007 at the Wayback Machine Eliot family genealogy including T S Eliot Eliot s grave Lyndall Gordon Eliot s Early Years Oxford and New York Oxford University Press 1977 ISBN 978 0 19 812078 0 T S Eliot Profile Poems Essays at Poets org T S Eliot on Nobelprize org nbsp Works edit Works by T S Eliot in eBook form at Standard Ebooks Works by T S Eliot at Project Gutenberg Works by T S Thomas Stearns Eliot at Faded Page Canada Works by or about T S Eliot at Internet Archive Works by T S Eliot at LibriVox public domain audiobooks nbsp official listing of T S Eliot s works with some available in full doollee com listing of T S Eliot s works written for the stage Archived 22 November 2016 at the Wayback Machine Poems by T S Eliot and biography at PoetryFoundation org Text of early poems 1907 1910 printed in The Harvard Advocate T S Eliot Collection at Bartleby com T S Eliot s Cats The Sacred Wood Essays on Poetry and Criticism Knopf 1921 Via HathiTrust Websites edit T S Eliot Society UK Resource Hub T S Eliot Hypertext Project Official T S Eliot Estate site T S Eliot Society US Home PageArchives edit Archival material relating to T S Eliot UK National Archives nbsp Search for T S Eliot at Harvard University T S Eliot Collection Archived 28 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin T S Eliot Collection at Merton College Oxford University T S Eliot collection at University of Victoria Special Collections T S Eliot collection at the University of Maryland Libraries T S Eliot Collection Yale Collection of American Literature Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Miscellaneous edit Links to audio recordings of Eliot reading his work An interview with Eliot Donald Hall Spring Summer 1959 T S Eliot The Art of Poetry No 1 The Paris Review Spring Summer 1959 21 Yale College Lecture on T S Eliot audio video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses T S Eliot at the British Library Newspaper clippings about T S Eliot in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title T S Eliot amp oldid 1202702215, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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