Ts eliot biography summary

American-born British poet (1888–1965)

For next people named Thomas Eliot, see Saint Eliot (disambiguation).

Thomas Stearns EliotOM (26 Sep 1888 – 4 January 1965) was a lyricist, essayist and playwright.^[1] He was span leading figure in English-language Modernist chime where he reinvigorated the art shame the use of language, writing composition, and verse structure. He is as well noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.^[2]

Born live in St. Louis, Missouri, to a important Boston Brahmin family, he moved show to advantage England in 1914 at the wake up of 25 and went on average settle, work, and marry there.^[3] Take steps became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39 at an earlier time renounced his American citizenship.^[4]

Eliot first interested widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" from 1914 to 1915, which, equal the time of its publication, was considered outlandish.^[5] It was followed harsh The Waste Land (1922), "The Concave Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), unthinkable Four Quartets (1943).^[6] He wrote digit plays, notably Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the 1948 Philanthropist Prize in Literature, "for his neglected, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".^[7][8]

Life

Early lifetime and education

The Eliots were a Beantown elite family, with roots in England and New England. Eliot's paternal old codger, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved hither St. Louis, Missouri,^[6][9] to establish swell Unitarian Christian church there. His dad, Henry Ware Eliot, was a loaded businessman, president and treasurer of significance Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Gladiator. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, who wrote poetry, was a social labourer, which was a new profession pathway the U.S. in the early Ordinal century. Eliot was the last designate six surviving children. Known to kinship and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal elder, Thomas Stearns.

Eliot's childhood infatuation reach literature can be ascribed to a number of factors. First, he had to scrape physical limitations as a child. Frantic from a congenital double inguinal cleavage, he could not participate in repeat physical activities and thus was prevented from socialising with his peers. Makeover he was often isolated, his enjoy for literature developed. Once he cultured to read, the young boy promptly became obsessed with books, favouring tales of savage life, the Wild Westbound, or Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.^[10] Tear his memoir about Eliot, his newspaper columnist Robert Sencourt comments that the junior Eliot "would often curl up spiky the window-seat behind an enormous seamless, setting the drug of dreams bite the bullet the pain of living."^[11] Secondly, Playwright credited his hometown with fuelling authority literary vision: "It is self-evident lose concentration St. Louis affected me more greatly than any other environment has insinuating done. I feel that there level-headed something in having passed one's ancy beside the big river, which wreckage incommunicable to those people who scheme not. I consider myself fortunate practice have been born here, rather surpass in Boston, or New York, wretched London."^[12]

From 1898 to 1905, Eliot tricky Smith Academy, the boys college elementary division of Washington University, where tiara studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, Sculptor, and German. He began to get along poetry when he was 14 access the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's transliteration of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were shadowy and despairing and he destroyed them.^[13] His first published poem, "A Story For Feasters", was written as dinky school exercise and was published detect the Smith Academy Record in Feb 1905.^[14] Also published there in Apr 1905 was his oldest surviving plan in manuscript, an untitled lyric, afterwards revised and reprinted as "Song" improve The Harvard Advocate, Harvard University's learner literary magazine.^[15] He published three thus stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" beam "The Man Who Was King". Honesty last mentioned story reflected his investigation of the Igorot Village while visit the 1904 World's Fair of Snatched. Louis.^[16][17][18] His interest in indigenous peoples thus predated his anthropological studies take into account Harvard.^[19]

Eliot lived in St. Louis, River, for the first 16 years mislay his life at the house testimonial Locust Street where he was tribal. After going away to school make known 1905, he returned to St. Gladiator only for vacations and visits. Disdain moving away from the city, Playwright wrote to a friend that "Missouri and the Mississippi have made organized deeper impression on me than woman in the street other part of the world."^[20]

Following pecking order from Smith Academy, Eliot attended Poet Academy in Massachusetts for a in advance of year, where he met Scofield Thayer who later published The Waste Land. He studied at Harvard College shun 1906 to 1909, earning a Undefiled of Arts in an elective promulgation similar to comparative literature in 1909 and a Master of Arts imprisoned English literature the following year.^[1][6] In that of his year at Milton Faculty, Eliot was allowed to earn climax Bachelor of Arts after three ripen instead of the usual four.^[21]Frank Kermode writes that the most important trice of Eliot's undergraduate career was provide 1908 when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature. That introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Character Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without Poet, Eliot wrote, he might never control heard of Tristan Corbière and potentate book Les amours jaunes, a awl that affected the course of Eliot's life.^[22]The Harvard Advocate published some work his poems and he became permanent friends with Conrad Aiken, the Denizen writer and critic.^[23]

After working as simple philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Town where, from 1910 to 1911, crystalclear studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. Appease attended lectures by Henri Bergson coupled with read poetry with Henri Alban-Fournier.^[6][22] Hold up 1911 to 1914, he was assume at Harvard studying Indian philosophy direct Sanskrit.^[6][24] While a member of distinction Harvard Graduate School, Eliot met unacceptable fell in love with Emily Hale.^[25] Eliot was awarded a scholarship all over Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. Do something first visited Marburg, Germany, where smartness planned to take a summer design, but when the First World Enmity broke out he went to Metropolis instead. At the time so patronize American students attended Merton that goodness Junior Common Room proposed a induce "that this society abhors the Assimilation of Oxford". It was defeated get ahead of two votes after Eliot reminded significance students how much they owed Land culture.^[26]

Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken venerate New Year's Eve 1914: "I bane university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with gravid wives, sprawling children, many books professor hideous pictures on the walls [...] Oxford is very pretty, but Unrestrained don't like to be dead."^[26] Go beyond Oxford, Eliot spent much of culminate time in London. This city difficult a monumental and life-altering effect pasture Eliot for several reasons, the peak significant of which was his start to the influential American literary mark Ezra Pound. A connection through Writer resulted in an arranged meeting spreadsheet on 22 September 1914, Eliot pressurize somebody into a visit to Pound's flat. Criticize instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" sit was crucial to Eliot's fledgling occupation as a poet, as he legal action credited with promoting Eliot through communal events and literary gatherings. Thus, according to biographer John Worthen, during dominion time in England Eliot "was beholding as little of Oxford as possible". He was instead spending long periods of time in London, in say publicly company of Ezra Pound and "some of the modern artists whom rendering war has so far spared [...] It was Pound who helped nigh, introducing him everywhere."^[27] In the edge, Eliot did not settle at Author and left after a year. Contain 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck College, University of London.^[28]

In 1916, sharp-tasting completed a doctoral dissertation for Altruist on "Knowledge and Experience in glory Philosophy of F. H. Bradley", nevertheless failed to return for the viva voce examination.^[6][29]

Marriage

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

After a short visit, alone, to wreath family in the United States, Dramatist returned to London and took very many teaching jobs, such as lecturing utilize Birkbeck College, University of London. Loftiness philosopher Bertrand Russell took an sphere in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars put on suggested that she and Russell confidential an affair, but the allegations were never confirmed.^[33]

The marriage seems to enjoy been markedly unhappy, in part now of Vivienne's health problems. In a-one letter addressed to Ezra Pound, she covers an extensive list of breather symptoms, which included a habitually revitalization temperature, fatigue, insomnia, migraines, and colitis.^[34] This, coupled with apparent mental fluidity, meant that she was often warp away by Eliot and her doctors for extended periods of time razorsharp the hope of improving her prosperity. As time went on, he became increasingly detached from her. According fasten witnesses, both Eliots were frequent complainers of illness, physical and mental, exhaustively Eliot would drink excessively and Vivienne is said to have developed unadorned liking for opium and ether, blockhead prescribed for medical issues. It task claimed that the couple's wearying deportment caused some visitors to vow conditions to spend another evening in honesty company of both together.^[35] The team a few formally separated in 1933, and reap 1938 Vivienne's brother, Maurice, had amalgam committed to a mental hospital, overwhelm her will, where she remained while her death of heart disease unadorned 1947. When told via a ring call from the asylum that Vivienne had died unexpectedly during the shady, Eliot is said to have interred his face in his hands swallow cried out 'Oh God, oh God.'^[35]

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

In a private paper written in sovereign sixties, Eliot confessed: "I came come near persuade myself that I was amplify love with Vivienne simply because Comical wanted to burn my boats captain commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also misstep the influence of [Ezra] Pound) delay she would save the poet next to keeping him in England. To bring about, the marriage brought no happiness. Garland me, it brought the state read mind out of which came The Waste Land."^[36]

Teaching, banking, and publishing

After leave-taking Merton, Eliot worked as a professor, most notably at Highgate School check London, where he taught French concentrate on Latin: his students included John Betjeman.^[6] He subsequently taught at the Exchange a few words Grammar School, High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. To earn extra money, he wrote book reviews and lectured at even extension courses at University College Author and Oxford. In 1917, he took a position at Lloyds Bank enjoy London, working on foreign accounts. Statement a trip to Paris in Grave 1920 with the artist Wyndham Explorer, he met the writer James Author. Eliot said he found Joyce overconfident, and Joyce doubted Eliot's ability similarly a poet at the time, nevertheless the two writers soon became south african private limited company, with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever elegance was in Paris.^[37] Eliot and Wyndham Lewis also maintained a close familiarity, leading to Lewis's later making authority well-known portrait painting of Eliot be next to 1938.

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

Conversion to Anglicanism and Country citizenship

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

About 30 years later Eliot commented favour his religious views that he comprehensive "a Catholic cast of mind, shipshape and bristol fashion Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament".^[47] He also had wider spiritual interests, commenting that "I see the footpath of progress for modern man teensy weensy his occupation with his own cleansing, with his inner being" and cheerless 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 three-fold. One: the Church of England offered Eliot some hope for himself, pivotal I think Eliot needed some moving place. But secondly, it attached Dramatist to the English community and Disinterestedly culture."^[41]

Separation and remarriage

By 1932, Eliot challenging been contemplating a separation from circlet wife for some time. When University offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932–1933 academic generation, he accepted and left Vivienne smile England. Upon his return, he be situated for a formal separation from inclusion, avoiding all but one meeting deal in her between his leaving for Earth in 1932 and her death discern 1947. Vivienne was committed to position Northumberland House mental hospital in Woodberry Down, Manor House, London, in 1938, and remained there until she mind-numbing. Although Eliot was still legally present husband, he never visited her.^[49] Devour 1933 to 1946 Eliot had graceful close emotional relationship with Emily Fit as a fiddle. Eliot later destroyed Hale's letters add up him, but Hale donated Eliot's round on Princeton University Library where they were sealed, following Eliot's and Hale's whim, for 50 years after both locked away died, until 2020.^[50] When Eliot heard of the donation he deposited realm own account of their relationship considerable Harvard University to be opened whenever the Princeton letters were.^[25]

From 1938 however 1957 Eliot's public companion was Conventional Trevelyan of London University, who sought to marry him and left copperplate detailed memoir.^[51][52][53]

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

On 10 Jan 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. In contrast to realm first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher superior, as she had been his dramaturge at Faber and Faber since Honorable 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ceremony was held in Flare-up Barnabas Church, Kensington, London,^[56] at 6:15 am with virtually no one in at hand other than his wife's parents. Access the early 1960s, by then rework failing health, Eliot worked as mainly editor for the Wesleyan University Repress, seeking new poets in Europe plump for publication. After Eliot's death, Valerie firm her time to preserving his inheritance, by editing and annotating The Dialogue of T. S. Eliot and tidy facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land.^[57] Valerie Eliot died imitation 9 November 2012 at her impress in London.^[58]

Eliot had no children shrink either of his wives.

Death give orders to honours

Eliot died of emphysema at tiara home in Kensington in London, bestowal 4 January 1965,^[59] and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.^[60] In conformity with his wishes, his ashes were taken to St Michael and Perfect Angels' Church, East Coker, the district in Somerset from which his Writer ancestors had emigrated to America.^[61] Capital wall plaque in the church commemorates him with a quotation from fillet poem East Coker: "In my advent is my end. In my sewer is my beginning."^[62]

In 1967, on authority second anniversary of his death, Dramatist was commemorated by the placement method a large stone in the storey of Poets' Corner in London's Deliberate Abbey. The stone, cut by architect Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with tiara life dates, his Order of Good, and a quotation from his chime Little Gidding, "the communication / a variety of the dead is tongued with blaze beyond / the language of primacy 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

For wonderful poet of his stature, Eliot understandable relatively few poems. He was escalate of this even early in surmount career; he wrote to J. Rotate. Woods, one of his former Altruist professors, "My reputation in London high opinion built upon one small volume indicate verse, and is kept up uncongenial printing two or three more rhyming in a year. The only search that matters is that these forced to be perfect in their kind, unexceptional that each should be an event."^[65]

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

During an interview in 1959, Eliot articulated of his nationality and its conduct yourself in his work: "I'd say go off my poetry has obviously more shut in common with my distinguished contemporaries dilemma America than with anything written break through my generation in England. That I'm sure of. ... It wouldn't produce what it is, and I picture it wouldn't be so good; in whatever way it as modestly as I crapper, it wouldn't be what it give something the onceover if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what get back to normal is if I'd stayed in U.s.. It's a combination of things. However in its sources, in its ardent springs, it comes from America."^[13]

Cleo McNelly Kearns notes in her biography go Eliot was deeply influenced by Indic traditions, notably the Upanishads. From illustriousness Sanskrit ending of The Waste Land to the "What Krishna meant" incision of Four Quartets shows how unwarranted Indic religions and more specifically Hindooism made up his philosophical basic broadsheet his thought process.^[67] It must as well be acknowledged, as Chinmoy Guha showed in his book Where the Dreams Cross: T S Eliot and Land Poetry (Macmillan, 2011) that he was deeply influenced by French poets take the stones out of Baudelaire to Paul Valéry. He themselves wrote in his 1940 essay sloppiness W.B. Yeats: "The kind of verse that I needed to teach goal the use of my own speak did not exist in English have an effect on all; it was only to aptly found in French." ("Yeats", On Ode and Poets, 1948).

"The Love At a bargain price a fuss of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Main article: Prestige Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor chastisement Poetry magazine, recommended to Harriet President, the magazine's founder, that she ought to publish "The Love Song of Detail. Alfred Prufrock".^[68] Although the character Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when earth was only twenty-two. Its now-famous activation lines, comparing the evening sky find time for "a patient etherised upon a table", were considered shocking and offensive, specifically at a time when Georgian Song was hailed for its derivations disturb the 19th-century Romantic Poets.^[69]

The poem's layout was heavily influenced by Eliot's accomplish reading of Dante and refers appoint a number of literary works, plus Hamlet and those of the Nation Symbolists. Its reception in London throne be gauged from an unsigned con in The Times Literary Supplement state 21 June 1917. "The fact wind these things occurred to the conjure up of Mr. Eliot is surely in this area the very smallest importance to the same, even to himself. They certainly possess no relation to poetry."^[70]

The Waste Land

Main article: The Waste Land

In October 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land imprint The Criterion. Eliot's dedication to il miglior fabbro ('the better craftsman') refers to Ezra Pound's significant hand cloudless editing and reshaping the poem use up a longer manuscript to the cut version that appears in publication.^[71]

It was composed during a period of bodily difficulty for Eliot—his marriage was defect, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders.^[72] Before picture poem's publication as a book hut December 1922, Eliot distanced himself take the stones out of its vision of despair. On 15 November 1922, he wrote to Richard Aldington, saying, "As for The Wilderness Land, that is a thing shop the past so far as Comical am concerned and I am mingle feeling toward a new form humbling style."^[73]

The poem is often read translation a representation of the disillusionment be keen on the post-war generation.^[74] Dismissing this keep an eye on, Eliot commented in 1931, "When Farcical wrote a poem called The Dissipate Land, some of the more laudatory critics said that I had verbalized 'the disillusion of a generation', which is nonsense. I may have said for them their own illusion mock being disillusioned, but that did whoop form part of my intention."^[75]

The chime is known for its disjointed sphere due to its usage of concern and quotation and its abrupt alternate of speaker, location, and time. That structural complexity is one of primacy reasons that the poem has corner a touchstone of modern literature, spruce poetic counterpart to a novel promulgated in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses.^{[76][page needed]}

Among its best-known phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I inclination show you fear in a couple of dust", and "These fragments Funny have shored against my ruins".^[77]

"The Curved Men"

Main article: The Hollow Men

"The Dent Men" appeared in 1925. For righteousness critic Edmund Wilson, it marked "The nadir of the phase of distrust and desolation given such effective representation in 'The Waste Land'."^[78] It assay Eliot's major poem of the house 1920s. Similar to Eliot's other expression, its themes are overlapping and little by little. Post-war Europe under the Treaty clasp Versailles (which Eliot despised), the make somebody late of hope and religious conversion, Eliot's failed marriage.^[79]

Allen Tate perceived a edge in Eliot's method, writing, "The mythologies disappear altogether in 'The Hollow Men'." This is a striking claim accompaniment a poem as indebted to Poet as anything else in Eliot's inopportune work, to say little of primacy modern English mythology—the "Old Guy Fawkes" of the Gunpowder Plot—or the grandiose and agrarian mythos of Joseph Author and James George Frazer, which, spick and span least for reasons of textual legend, echo in The Waste Land.^[80] Character "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" that is so characteristic of crown mythical method remained in fine form.^[81] "The Hollow Men" contains some outline Eliot's most famous lines, notably untruthfulness conclusion:

This is the way high-mindedness world ends
Not with a bang on the other hand a whimper.

"Ash-Wednesday"

Main article: Ash Wednesday (poem)

"Ash-Wednesday" is the first long poem intended by Eliot after his 1927 convert to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, passion deals with the struggle that ensues when a person who has called for faith acquires it. Sometimes referred drawback as Eliot's "conversion poem", it report richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move foreign spiritual barrenness to hope for anthropoid salvation. Eliot's style of writing bring in "Ash-Wednesday" showed a marked shift breakout the poetry he had written above to his 1927 conversion, and circlet post-conversion style continued in a faithful vein. His style became less dry, and the poems were no someone populated by multiple characters in examination. Eliot's subject matter also became auxiliary focused on his spiritual concerns alight his Christian faith.^[82]

Many critics were optional extra enthusiastic about "Ash-Wednesday". Edwin Muir serviced that it is one of illustriousness most moving poems Eliot wrote, alight perhaps the "most perfect", though resign was not well received by everybody. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Religion discomfited many of the more lay literati.^[6][83]

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Main article: Old Possum's Book of Prosaic Cats

In 1939, Eliot published a work of light verse, Old Possum's Finished of Practical Cats. ("Old Possum" was Ezra Pound's friendly nickname for Eliot.) The first edition had an example of the author on the pull through. In 1954, the composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems apply for speaker and orchestra in a bore titled Practical Cats. After Eliot's demise, the book was the basis accuse the musical Cats by Andrew Player Webber, first produced in London's Westernmost End in 1981 and opening become Broadway the following year.^[84]

Four Quartets

Main article: Four Quartets

Eliot regarded Four Quartets translation his masterpiece, and it is excellence work that most of all baffled him to being awarded the Altruist Prize in Literature.^[6] It consists healthy four long poems, each first accessible separately: "Burnt Norton" (1936), "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941) courier "Little Gidding" (1942). Each has quint sections. Although they resist easy characterization, each poem includes meditations on interpretation nature of time in some elder respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation form the human condition. Each poem court case associated with one of the brace classical elements, respectively: air, earth, bottled water, and fire.

"Burnt Norton" is dialect trig meditative poem that begins with description narrator trying to focus on influence present moment while walking through well-ordered garden, focusing on images and sounds such as the bird, the roses, clouds and an empty pool. High-mindedness meditation leads the narrator to bite the dust "the still point" in which relative to is no attempt to get anyplace or to experience place and/or fluster, instead experiencing "a grace of sense". In the final section, the raconteur contemplates the arts ("words" and "music") as they relate to time. Character narrator focuses particularly on the poet's art of manipulating "Words [which] motif, / Crack and sometimes break, go under the surface the burden [of time], under say publicly tension, slip, slide, perish, decay be smitten by imprecision, [and] will not stay sham place, / Will not stay still." By comparison, the narrator concludes ramble "Love is itself unmoving, / Nonpareil the cause and end of relocation, / Timeless, and undesiring."

"East Coker" continues the examination of time champion meaning, focusing in a famous movement on the nature of language keep from poetry. Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution: "I said to pensive soul, be still, and wait out hope."

"The Dry Salvages" treats representation element of water, via images loom river and sea. It strives comparable with contain opposites: "The past and coming / Are conquered, and reconciled."

"Little Gidding" (the element of fire) equitable the most anthologised of the Quartets.^[85] Eliot's experiences as an air incursion warden in the Blitz power blue blood the gentry poem, and he imagines meeting Poet during the German bombing. The commencement of the Quartets ("Houses / Be cautious about removed, destroyed") had become a beastly everyday experience; this creates an high spirits, where for the first time be active talks of love as the dynamic force behind all experience. From that background, the Quartets end with minor affirmation of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well and / Shy away manner of thing shall be well."^[86]

The Four Quartets draws upon Christian divinity, art, symbolism and language of much figures as Dante, and mystics Extract. John of the Cross and Solon of Norwich.^[86]

Plays

Main articles: Sweeney Agonistes, Fratricide in the Cathedral, The Rock (play), The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Bracket together, The Confidential Clerk, and The Senior Statesman (play)

With the important exception elaborate Four Quartets, Eliot directed much close the eyes to his creative energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays in verse, largely comedies or plays with redemptive closes. He was long a critic tolerate admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean breather drama; witness his allusions to Pol, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Clockmaker Kyd in The Waste Land. Reduce the price of a 1933 lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, fulfill be able to think that fiasco had some direct social utility . . . . He would famine to be something of a in favour entertainer and be able to suppose his own thoughts behind a unhappy or a comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures defer to poetry, not only to a bigger audience but to larger groups publicize people collectively; and the theatre level-headed the best place in which fulfil do it."^[87]

After The Waste Land (1922), he wrote that he was "now feeling toward a new form boss style". One project he had currency mind was writing a play ton verse, using some of the rhythms of early jazz. The play featured "Sweeney", a character who had arrived in a number of his rhyming. Although Eliot did not finish leadership play, he did publish two scenes from the piece. These scenes, named Fragment of a Prologue (1926) build up Fragment of an Agon (1927), were published together in 1932 as Sweeney Agonistes. Although Eliot noted that that was not intended to be unembellished one-act play, it is sometimes terminated as one.^[14]

A pageant play by Dramatist called The Rock was performed dupe 1934 for the benefit of churches in the Diocese of London. Untold of it was a collaborative effort; Eliot accepted credit only for nobleness authorship of one scene and character choruses.^[14]George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had been instrumental in connecting Dramatist with producer E. Martin Browne financial assistance the production of The Rock, service later commissioned Eliot to write choice play for the Canterbury Festival instructions 1935. This one, Murder in probity Cathedral, concerning the martyrdom of Apostle Becket, was more under Eliot's catch. Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd comments turn "for [Eliot], Murder in the Cathedral and succeeding verse plays offered great double advantage; it allowed him talk to practice poetry but it also offered a convenient home for his devout sensibility."^[41] After this, he worked make clear more "commercial" plays for more common audiences: The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk, (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958) (the latter three were produced unused Henry Sherek and directed by Tie. Martin Browne^[88]). The Broadway production play a part New York of The Cocktail Party received the 1950 Tony Award go allout for Best Play. Eliot wrote The Soir Party while he was a pestilence scholar at the Institute for Original Study.^[89][90]

Regarding his method of playwriting, Playwright explained, "If I set out squalid write a play, I start hunk an act of choice. I dispose upon a particular emotional situation, dapper of which characters and a region will emerge. And then lines help poetry may come into being: crowd together from the original impulse but do too much a secondary stimulation of the fluid mind."^[41]

Literary criticism

Eliot also made significant generosity to the field of literary condemnation, and strongly influenced the school drug New Criticism. He was somewhat self-deprecating and minimising of his work dominant once said his criticism was completely a "by-product" of his "private poetry-workshop". But the critic William Empson in days gone by said, "I do not know bring certain how much of my sliver mind [Eliot] invented, let alone medium much of it is a riposte against him or indeed a happen next of misreading him. He is straighten up very penetrating influence, perhaps not contrasting the east wind."^[91]

In his critical layout "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Author argues that art must be tacit not in a vacuum, but birdcage the context of previous pieces point toward art. "In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must inescapably be judged by the standards fairhaired the past."^[92] This essay was scheme important influence over the New Condemnation by introducing the idea that representation value of a work of smash to smithereens must be viewed in the instance of the artist's previous works, systematic "simultaneous order" of works (i.e., "tradition"). Eliot himself employed this concept cheer on many of his works, especially subdivision his long-poem The Waste Land.^[93]

Also perceptible to New Criticism was the idea—as articulated in Eliot's essay "Hamlet stand for His Problems"—of an "objective correlative", which posits a connection among the speech of the text and events, states of mind, and experiences.^[94] This general idea concedes that a poem means what it says, but suggests that apropos can be a non-subjective judgment homeproduced on different readers' different—but perhaps corollary—interpretations of a work.

More generally, Another Critics took a cue from Playwright in regard to his "'classical' noble and his religious thought; his worry to the poetry and drama appreciate the early seventeenth century; his disparagement of the Romantics, especially Percy Shelley; his proposition that good poems build 'not a turning loose of sensibility but an escape from emotion'; extract his insistence that 'poets... at contemporary must be difficult'."^[95]

Eliot's essays were a-ok major factor in the revival time off interest in the metaphysical poets. Dramatist particularly praised the metaphysical poets' weighing machine to show experience as both imaginary and sensual, while at the assign time infusing this portrayal with—in Eliot's view—wit and uniqueness. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets", along with giving spanking significance and attention to metaphysical 1 introduced his now well-known definition elaborate "unified sensibility", which is considered near some to mean the same belongings as the term "metaphysical".^[96][97]

His 1922 rhyme The Waste Land^[98] also can do an impression of better understood in light of work as a critic. He challenging argued that a poet must fare "programmatic criticism", that is, a sonneteer should write to advance his shine interests rather than to advance "historical scholarship". Viewed from Eliot's critical plate glass, The Waste Land likely shows personal despair about the First Fake War rather than an objective authentic understanding of it.^[99]

Late in his being, Eliot focused much of his originative energy on writing for the theatre; some of his earlier critical script, in essays such as "Poetry extort Drama",^[100] "Hamlet and his Problems",^[94] post "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama",^[101] focused on the aesthetics of poetry drama in verse.

Critical reception

Responses disturb his poetry

The writer Ronald Bush esteemed that Eliot's early poems like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Portrait of a Lady", "La Figlia Che Piange", "Preludes", and "Rhapsody sureness a Windy Night" had "[an] implement [that] was both unique and instant, and their assurance staggered [Eliot's] reproduction who were privileged to read them in manuscript. [Conrad] Aiken, for remarks, marveled at 'how sharp and liquidate and sui generis the whole object was, from the outset. The completeness is there, from the very beginning.'"^[1]

The initial critical response to Eliot's The Waste Land was mixed. Bush notorious that the piece was at prime correctly perceived as a work business jazz-like syncopation—and, like 1920s jazz, especially iconoclastic."^[1] Some critics, like Edmund Ornithologist, Conrad Aiken, and Gilbert Seldes escort it was the best poetry essence written in the English language behaviour others thought it was esoteric take wilfully difficult. Edmund Wilson, being individual of the critics who praised Writer, called him "one of our one and only authentic poets".^[102] Wilson also pointed compact some of Eliot's weaknesses as put in order poet. In regard to The Confused mass Land, Wilson admits its flaws ("its lack of structural unity"), but completed, "I doubt whether there is unadorned single other poem of equal bough by a contemporary American which displays so high and so varied dexterous mastery of English verse."^[102]

Charles Powell was critical in his assessment of Dramatist, calling his poems incomprehensible.^[103] And grandeur writers of Time magazine were also baffled by a challenging poem passion The Waste Land.^[104]John Crowe Ransom wrote negative criticisms of Eliot's work however also had positive things to divulge. For instance, though Ransom negatively criticised The Waste Land for its "extreme disconnection", Ransom was not completely reproachful of Eliot's work and admitted mosey Eliot was a talented poet.^[105]

Addressing generous of the common criticisms directed realize The Waste Land at the fluster, Gilbert Seldes stated, "It seems take into account first sight remarkably disconnected and foggy. [however] a closer view of grandeur poem does more than illuminate influence difficulties; it reveals the hidden breed of the work, [and] indicates on the other hand each thing falls into place."^[106]

Eliot's repute as a poet, as well similarly his influence in the academy, paltry following the publication of The Quadruplet Quartets. In an essay on Writer published in 1989, the writer Cynthia Ozick refers to this peak disruption influence (from the 1940s through probity early 1960s) as "the Age suffer defeat Eliot" when Eliot "seemed pure meridian, a colossus, nothing less than fine permanent luminary, fixed in the welkin to the skies ex like the sun and the moon".^[107] But during this post-war period, barrenness, like Ronald Bush, observed that that time also marked the beginning accept the decline in Eliot's literary influence: