T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of seven children in a prosperous and cultivated household ^[1]. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, ran a brick manufacturing company, and his mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, wrote poetry and worked in social reform. The family descended from New England stock: Eliot's grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved west to found a Unitarian church in St. Louis and helped establish Washington University ^[1]. That mixture of Midwestern childhood and inherited Boston tradition marked the poet for life, and he later said he felt fully at home in neither place.

A congenital hernia kept the young Eliot out of rough games, so he read instead. Summers on the Massachusetts coast at Gloucester gave him the sea imagery that surfaces throughout his verse ^[2]. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis, then Milton Academy near Boston, before entering Harvard in 1906. At Harvard he moved quickly, completing his bachelor's degree in three years and beginning graduate study in philosophy ^[1].

The decisive event of these student years was a book. Around 1908 Eliot discovered Arthur Symons's study The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which led him to the French poet Jules Laforgue ^[2]. Laforgue's ironic, conversational manner showed Eliot how a modern city dweller's self-consciousness could become the material of poetry. The earliest drafts of what became The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock date from this period, written while Eliot was still in his early twenties ^[2].

Eliot spent the academic year 1910 to 1911 in Paris, attending lectures by the philosopher Henri Bergson and absorbing the literary life of the city ^[1]. He returned to Harvard for doctoral work on the idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley, and in 1914 a fellowship took him to Merton College, Oxford. The outbreak of the First World War stranded him in England, and the country became his permanent home. He completed his dissertation but never returned to Harvard to defend it, choosing literature over an academic career in philosophy ^[1].

The meeting that changed his fortunes came in September 1914, when the American poet Ezra Pound read Prufrock in London. Pound declared that Eliot had modernized himself on his own and pressed Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago, to print the poem. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock appeared in Poetry in June 1915, and Eliot's first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, followed in 1917 ^[3]. Readers accustomed to Edwardian verse found the poem baffling; younger writers found it liberating.

Poetry did not pay the bills. Eliot taught school briefly, then in 1917 took a position in the foreign accounts department of Lloyds Bank in London, where he worked for eight years ^[1]. He wrote reviews and essays at night, building a reputation as a formidable critic. His 1919 essay Tradition and the Individual Talent argued that a poet writes within the whole of European literature at once, and that good poetry is an escape from personality rather than an expression of it ^[4]. The essay became one of the most quoted statements of critical principle in the century.

In 1922 Eliot published The Waste Land, the poem most often cited among T. S. Eliot achievements and one of the defining documents of literary modernism ^[3]. Written partly during a period of nervous collapse and revised drastically at Pound's suggestion, the poem stitched together fragments of myth, popular song, multiple languages, and London street life into 434 lines. Its portrait of a civilization exhausted by war spoke directly to the postwar generation. Eliot dedicated the published version to Pound, calling him the better craftsman. The poem first appeared in The Criterion, the quarterly review Eliot founded and edited that same year ^[3].

His influence widened when he joined the publishing house Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber) in 1925 as an editor and director ^[1]. From that desk he shaped British poetry for four decades, publishing W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Ted Hughes, and many others. Few editors have had comparable power over a national literature. His own work continued with Ash Wednesday in 1930, a meditative sequence reflecting his religious conversion, and with verse drama, beginning with Murder in the Cathedral in 1935, a play about the martyrdom of Thomas Becket written for Canterbury Cathedral ^[5].

Four Quartets, completed in 1943, gathered four long meditations on time, memory, and the divine: Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding. Many critics regard the sequence as the summit of his poetry ^[2]. Recognition arrived in a rush in 1948, when Eliot received both the British Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry ^[6]. A lighter book, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats from 1939, reached an audience he could not have predicted when Andrew Lloyd Webber adapted it as the musical Cats in 1981 ^[7].

In June 1915, only months after settling in England, Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an Englishwoman he had known for a short time ^[1]. The marriage was unhappy almost from the start. Vivienne suffered from chronic physical and mental illness, and Eliot's own health broke down under the strain; the treatment he sought in Lausanne in 1921 coincided with the completion of The Waste Land ^[3]. The couple separated in 1933. Vivienne was committed to a psychiatric hospital in 1938 and died there in 1947, and the burden of the marriage shadowed Eliot for decades ^[2].

Two public declarations in 1927 redefined his identity. He was baptized into the Church of England, embracing the Anglo-Catholic wing of that church, and he became a naturalized British citizen ^[1]. The following year he described his position as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion, a formula that startled admirers who had read The Waste Land as a work of radical doubt. Faith reoriented his poetry, his drama, and his social criticism from that point onward.

Happiness came late. In January 1957 Eliot, then sixty-eight, married Valerie Fletcher, his secretary at Faber and Faber, who was thirty years his junior ^[1]. By all accounts the second marriage brought him contentment he had never known. After his death Valerie Eliot devoted herself to his legacy, editing the facsimile edition of The Waste Land drafts and the volumes of his letters ^[7].

After the Second World War Eliot stood as the most honored man of letters in the English-speaking world. Beyond the Nobel Prize and the Order of Merit, he collected honorary degrees from universities on both sides of the Atlantic and drew enormous crowds to his lectures; a 1956 appearance at the University of Minnesota filled a basketball arena with an audience reported at around 14,000 people ^[2]. His critical pronouncements, delivered in books such as Notes Towards the Definition of Culture in 1948, were debated far beyond literary circles.

His creative energy in these years went mostly into the theatre. The Cocktail Party, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949, became a genuine commercial success on Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Play in 1950 ^[5]. Two further comedies followed, The Confidential Clerk in 1953 and The Elder Statesman in 1958. Eliot wanted verse drama to reach ordinary theatregoers, and he deliberately loosened his poetic line until audiences could forget they were hearing verse.

Emphysema, aggravated by years of heavy smoking and London air, weakened him through his final decade. He wintered in warmer climates when he could and continued working at Faber almost to the end. Eliot died at his home in Kensington, London, on January 4, 1965, at the age of seventy-six ^[1]. He was cremated, and his ashes were placed at St Michael's Church in East Coker, the Somerset village his ancestors had left for America, under a memorial bearing words from his own poem: in my beginning is my end ^[2].

Eliot's standing rests on a body of poetry that is small by the standards of his contemporaries but unmatched in influence. The Waste Land altered what a poem could be, replacing narrative continuity with juxtaposed fragments and trusting readers to assemble the meaning. Generations of poets in English and in dozens of other languages wrote under its pressure, whether imitating it or reacting against it ^[2]. Prufrock, the hollow men, April as the cruellest month: his phrases passed into common speech, a fate few modern poets share.

As a critic he was equally consequential. Essays collected in The Sacred Wood and later volumes revalued the English canon, lifting John Donne and the Metaphysical poets, praising Dante, and questioning Milton's influence. His ideas about impersonality and the objective correlative supplied the vocabulary for the New Criticism that dominated university English departments in the mid twentieth century ^[4]. A memorial stone in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, unveiled in 1967, confirmed his place in the national literature of his adopted country ^[1].

His reputation has not gone unchallenged. Scholars have documented antisemitic lines in his early poetry and prose, most notably in the 1920 poem Gerontion and in his 1934 lectures published as After Strange Gods, and the debate over how these passages affect his standing continues ^[8]. Later readers have also weighed his treatment of Vivienne, dramatized in the 1994 film Tom and Viv. Yet the poems keep their hold. Any honest T. S. Eliot biography must reckon with both the flaws of the man and the durability of the work, and among the basic T. S. Eliot facts is this: a century after Prufrock, students still memorize his lines, and the opening of The Waste Land remains among the most recognized passages in modern literature ^[2].