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T. S. Eliot (1888 - 1965). I. The author: T. S. Eliot, American-British poet and critic, was born from a middle-class family in St. Louis in 1888.
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I. The author: • T. S. Eliot, American-British poet and critic, was born from a middle-class family in St. Louis in 1888. • During his studies at Harvard in America, the Sorbonne in Paris, and Oxford in England, Eliot mastered French, Italian, English literature, as well as Sanskrit. • In 1914 Eliot accepted a job in London as a bank clerk establishing his residence in London. Soon the erudite young man joined the literary circle of Pound and Yeats and started to write poetry. In 1917 his first poem was published and caused a great deal of comment on both side of the Atlantic. • After the bank clerk, Eliot worked as an assistant editor of the Egoist (1917–19) and edited his own quarterly, the Criterion (1922–39). With the help of Pound he published his best-known work, The Waste Land, in 1922.
His first marriage in 1915 was troubled and ended with their separation in 1933. His subsequent marriage in 1957 was far more successful. • In 1925 he was employed by the publishing house of Faber and Faber, eventually becoming one of its directors, a position which he held until his death. In 1927 he became a British subject remaining in England where his entire life was devoted to literature. • He wrote several plays, but his best work is a group of four long poems entitled Four Quartets, written between 1935 and 1941, which led to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1948 and made him one of the most distinguished literary figures of the 20th century.
II. Works: • Poetry • Eliot’s early poetical works—Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land (1922)—employing myths, religious symbolism, and literary allusion, signified a break with 19th-century poetic traditions, express the anguish and barrenness of modern life and the isolation of the individual, particularly as reflected in the failure of love. Their models were the metaphysical poets, Dante, and French Symbolists. Their meter ranged from the lyrical to the conversational. • his later poetry, notably Ash Wednesday (1930) and the Four Quartets (1935–42), Eliot turned from spiritual desolation to hope for human salvation.
Eliot was an extraordinarily influential critic, rejecting Romantic notions of unfettered originality and arguing for the impersonality of great art. His later criticism attempts to support Christian culture against what he saw as the empty and fragmented values of secularism. His outstanding critical works are contained in: The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) Essays Ancient and Modern (1936) Notes towards a Definition of Culture (1948). • His plays attempt to revitalize verse drama and usually treat the same themes as in his poetry. The most important is: Murder in the Cathedral (1935), dealing with the final hours of Thomas Becket.
III. The Style of Poetry: • Eliot attempted to produce “pure imagery” with no added meaning or symbolism. • He began adding one image to another in such a way that his attitude and mood became clear. In his best works, the image, his own philosophy and the music of words are all harmoniously blended although he mingled grand images with commonplace ones and combined trivial and tawdry images with traditional poetic subjects. • Eliot rarely made his meaning explicit. The internal logic of his poems is carried out by swiftly accumulating images, suggestions and echoes, depending for their interpretation upon the imagination of the reader.
