Eliot, T. S. (1888–1965)

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ELIOT, T. S. (1888–1965)

American/British poet, critic, and dramatist.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Thomas Stearns Eliot moved to New England in 1906, the home for 300 years of Puritan relatives, to study literature at Harvard, and then to England in 1914, the home of even earlier forbears, to study philosophy at Oxford. He married, undertook jobs as teacher, banker, and editor, and became a British subject in 1927. He can be said to have died a European in 1965, having received the Hanseatic Goethe Award in Germany (1955), the Dante Gold Medal in Italy (1959), the Order of Merit in Britain (1948), and the Nobel Prize for literature in Sweden (1948) as acknowledgements of career-long dedication to development of what he called "the mind of Europe" (Eliot, 1975, p. 39).

Pursuing Harvard doctoral work at Oxford, but prevented by World War I from returning to America to defend his thesis (Knowledge and Experience, 1964), Eliot engaged the work of leading philosophers: Francis Herbert Bradley, Henri Bergson, William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, Edmund Husserl, Bertrand Russell. He also learned Sanskrit to study Indian philosophy. During the decade of his serious philosophical work, Eliot moved from a traditional conception of signs as re -presentation of the real to our contemporary conception of signs as presentation of the real.

In London in 1914, Eliot met Ezra Pound (1885–1972) who arranged for publication of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), declaring astonishment that Eliot had modernized himself. Eliot admired the work of imagists like Pound and T. E. Hulme and published early poems in Wyndham Lewis's vorticist journal BLAST, but developed his distinctive early poetic idiom (widely imitated, thereby becoming a distinctively modern idiom) from study of metaphysical poetry, Jacobean drama, French symbolism, and Dante. Eliot's focus upon squalid urban imagery and demoralized human behavior, his practice of speaking ironically through personae, and his preference for opaque narratives comprising clipped grammar and unusual, unpoetic words offended critics expecting poets speaking in their own voice, developing a steady current of ideas, and animated by the spirit of beauty.

Eliot launched his literary criticism with Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (1917), defending modern poetry's difficult meter, unfamiliar use of language, and displays of erudition. In several essays published between 1919 and 1923, Eliot defined a hermeneutic relationship between past and present literature, implicitly rejecting the anti-past futurism of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), and encouraged a formalism foundational to Anglo-American New Criticism, disallowing genetic and affective accounts of literature as compromising the integrity of the work of art as art. Against Romantic celebration of poetry as an exceptional person's experience, he argued that "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry" (Eliot, 1975, p. 40). Against Walter Pater's impressionism, he argued that a critic's sensitive and cultivated "impressions are as much created as transmitted by the criticism" (Eliot, 1975, p. 51). After baptism and confirmation into Anglican Christianity in 1927, however, Eliot came to regard literary criticism as necessarily completed by cultural criticism grounded in religious belief.

With publication of The Waste Land (1922), Eliot confirmed his position as preeminent English modernist poet, soon to rival William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) as most famous living poet. The poem presents fragments of 1920s London experience (zombie-like commuters, pub conversations, bored couples, banking business, abortion), weaving them together with parallels from the past (prophets thunder, Cleopatra sails the Nile, Tereus rapes Philomela, Augustine and the Buddha enjoin asceticism, Christ dies), all presented alongside hallucinated images of exhausted, drought-stricken lands made waste, according to Eliot's references to J. G. Frazer's Golden Bough, because the gods no longer bless humankind with fertility. Sometimes measuring the present against the past to show contemporary degeneration, at other times deploying immortal seers Tiresias and the Sybil to suggest that all time is the same, the poem projects personal spiritual dispossession and sexual enervation (which biographical criticism identifies as Eliot's own) as a timeless narrative of a culture's strikingly contemporary and disturbingly continuous dysfunctions. Baffling many, it struck a poetic avant-garde as faithfully rendering an intensely literary consciousness's kaleidoscopic impressions of European cultural collapse following World War I. Regarded in its own time as both the ultimate expression of high modernist aesthetics and important social criticism, its dramatic and sometimes violent juxtapositions of language, imagery, mood, times, events, and ideas continue to engage new readers.

Eliot's lifelong interest in theater expressed itself first in notable criticism of Renaissance dramatists and then in plays of his own. An uncompleted experimental verse play about inhabitants of a bed-sit wasteland in the modernist spirit of his early poetry was followed by Murder in the Cathedral (1935), verse drama focused on the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket (c. 1118–1170): Eliot uses a chorus, makes an act of a sermon, and has medieval murderers directly address the modern audience to justify their crime. Determined to reestablish verse drama on the modern stage, between 1938 and 1958 Eliot wrote several popular drawingroom comedies that present implicitly religious studies of sin, guilt, vocation, forgiveness, and love beneath their realistic surface.

From lines left over from Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot began a sequence of poems published during World War II as Four Quartets (1943). Affirming the value of the social, religious, and intellectual life that British history had fostered, the poems were a comfort and encouragement to many during the war. Continuing the meditative, penitential, and mystical mood of poems like Ash Wednesday (1930), still difficultly learned in their allusions but much more discursive and occasionally conversational in style, the poems explore questions of faith and fate, time and eternity, experience and expression—all from points of view ranging from the personal to the communal, and from the contemporary to the historical. Eliot regarded these poems as his best work.

Between the wars, Eliot expressed his commitment to continuity and coherence in contemporary European culture through his editorship of The Criterion (1922–1939). Soliciting contributions from intellectuals across Europe representing widely ranging aesthetic and political beliefs, Eliot declared himself "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion" (Eliot, 1975, pp. 18–19). In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), Eliot rejected fascist and communist solutions to Europe's modern social problems but bemoaned Europe's liberalism, regarding its laudable determination to free people from illegitimate constraints as ultimately a negative ideology that could oppose no positive vision to communism and fascism. In radio broadcasts and publications after World War II, Eliot discussed rebuilding European culture in the context of a new global order. Contemplating in Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) the difficulties of the secular experiment of building the good society by means of reason, Eliot suggested that since thinking the way to a radically different future cannot anticipate the way such a future would feel to its inhabitants, society should pursue a pragmatic conservatism.

Eliot's work continues to find itself at the center of contemporary cultural debates. Rapturous reception of his work as modern antidote to the poison of nineteenth-century convention was replaced by complaints in the postmodern last half of the twentieth century that his work was elitist, misogynistic, homophobic, fascistic, and anti-Semitic. A new generation of readers has returned to Eliot, finding that his deep and sophisticated engagement on so many fronts with the stresses and strains of modern life allows his work still to disclose new and challenging perspectives on the contemporary concerns (about relationships between high and low culture, gender, sexuality, ideology, racism, and so on) that we bring to it. "The mind of Europe," Eliot noted, "is a mind which changes, and … this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draftsmen"—or the work of Eliot himself (Eliot, 1975, p. 39).