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T.S. Eliot

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About Me

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.
It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.
As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century (most notably John Donne) and the 19th century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major later poems include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.
He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and was remarried, to Valerie Fletcher, in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and died in London in 1965.
The most important collections of Eliot's manuscripts can be found at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the New York Public Library; and the libraries of King's and Magdalene colleges, Cambridge University. Aside from the volumes already noted, among Eliot's numerous publications should be mentioned his extended appreciation, Dante (1929); his free rendition of Anabasis: A Poem by St. -J. Perse (1930); the collection of his Selected Essays 1917-1932 (1932; rev. ed., 1950); his Norton lectures, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933); his pugnacious and never reprinted Page-Barbour lectures, After Strange Gods (1934); Essays Ancient and Modern (1936); his metrical jeux d'esprit, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), popularized in the musical Cats; his studies in Christian culture, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes towards the Definition of Culture, (1948); and the late collections of essays On Poetry and Poets (1957) and To Criticize the Critic (1965). Eliot's Poems Written in Early Youth were collected and printed in 1950, his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation was published in 1964 as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, and the first volume of his Letters appeared in 1988.
Although no authorized biography of Eliot has yet appeared, Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (1984), and Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's New Life (1988), are extremely useful, supplemented by smaller specialized studies such as John Soldo, The Tempering of T. S. Eliot (1983), and by studies in biographical criticism such as Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years (1977), and Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (1984). The indispensable bibliography of Eliot's work is Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (1947; rev. ed., 1969). Standard critical studies begin with an early group including F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935; rev. ed., 1947); Helen Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot (1949); Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (1950); and Hugh Kenner, T. S. Eliot: The Invisible Poet (1959). F. R. Leavis's early and important appreciation in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) was expanded and qualified in essays collected in The Living Principle (1975). Essential studies of the composition of The Waste Land and Four Quartets can be found in A. Walton Litz, ed., Eliot in His Time (1973), and in Helen Gardner, The Composition of "Four Quartets" (1978).

My Interests

I'd like to meet:

Dante, Shakespeare, Jules Laforgue, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, John Milton, George Herbert, Mark Twain, to name a few.

My Blog

Why T S Eliot turned down George Orwell's Animal Farm for publication

Why T S Eliot turned down George Orwell's Animal Farm for publicationby Helen Pidd, The Guardian (London) Monday 30 March 2009http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/30/eliot-george -orwell-animal-far...
Posted by on Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:02:00 GMT

T S Eliot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKuA3iee4-c
Posted by on Thu, 01 May 2008 22:25:00 GMT

DEAR MRS ELIOT . . .

She is a devoted keeper of the flame but has Valerie Eliot, widow of TS Eliot, done the poet's reputation a disservice by delaying publication of his letters? Karen Christensen, who worked on the firs...
Posted by on Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:05:00 GMT

THE POSSIBILITY OF A POETIC DRAMA by T. S. ELIOT

The questions -- why there is no poetic drama to-day, how the stage has lost all hold on literary art, why so many poetic plays are written which can only be read, and read, if at all, without pleasur...
Posted by on Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:30:00 GMT

AN AMAZING DISCOVERY: A Thrift Store-y

A few years ago, a twenty-five year old graduate student in English Literature visited a thrift store outside Naples, Florida. There, languishing amidst the Danielle Steel novels and tattered copies ...
Posted by on Sat, 04 Aug 2007 09:02:00 GMT

An Interesting Wartime Letter

It's easy to see Eliot's masterpiece, Four Quartets, as a product of a deeply spiritual, highly cultured man. What is less obvious for readers today is that these same poems are also war poems, produ...
Posted by on Wed, 01 Aug 2007 04:50:00 GMT

TSE in The Anvil (Rare Photo)

T S Eliot's Photo in the Smith Academy AnvilCover:Photo & Blurb:
Posted by on Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:48:00 GMT

Rare Hirschfeld Caricature of T S Eliot

"A royalist in politics, a classicist in literature and an Anglo-Catholic in religion."
Posted by on Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:39:00 GMT

SCHOLARS: Open Access Online Articles on T S Eliot

T S Eliot (1888-1965) A selective bibliography of open access articles on T.S. Eliot, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere...
Posted by on Tue, 31 Jul 2007 10:11:00 GMT

A BLOG BY T.S. ELIOT? YES, and No Ouija Board Required!

A note of some kind seems mandatory for putting a blog of any kind on a site where the registrant is known to be dead (more than forty years dead, in point of fact). Yet, it is the intention of the co...
Posted by on Mon, 30 Jul 2007 12:27:00 GMT