T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was the most influential poet and critic writing in English in the first half of the twentieth century. An American from St Louis who settled in England, worked in a bank and then as a publisher, became a British subject and an Anglican, he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), the monologue of a timid, ageing man paralysed by self-consciousness that introduced a new voice into poetry; The Waste Land (1922), a fragmentary collage of a spiritually exhausted civilisation after the First World War, which became the emblematic poem of modernism; “The Hollow Men” (1925), which ends “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper”; and, after his conversion, Four Quartets (1936–42), long meditations on time, memory and the eternal. His critical essays — “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, “Hamlet and His Problems”, “The Metaphysical Poets” — reshaped literary taste for a generation. He won the Nobel Prize in 1948.

Life

St Louis and Harvard

Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St Louis, Missouri, the youngest of seven children of a prosperous brick manufacturer and a mother who wrote poetry, in a family of distinguished New England Unitarians; his grandfather had founded Washington University. He studied at Harvard (1906–14), where he read philosophy, Sanskrit and Indian philosophy, and discovered, through Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, the French Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue, whose ironic, colloquial manner freed his own voice. He wrote “Prufrock” in 1910–11. He spent a year in Paris and began a doctorate on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley.

London

In 1914 he went to Oxford on a fellowship and met Ezra Pound in London, who recognised his genius (“He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own”) and got “Prufrock” published in Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1915:

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table… In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo… I have measured out my life with coffee spoons… I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

In 1915 he impulsively married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a vivacious, nervous Englishwoman; the marriage was disastrous, both suffering from ill health and nervous strain, and Vivienne was eventually committed to an asylum (1938), where she died. Eliot abandoned his academic career and stayed in England, teaching school, then working in the colonial and foreign department of Lloyds Bank (1917–25), while reviewing and editing The Egoist. Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and Poems (1919/1920) — with “Gerontion” and the quatrain poems — and The Sacred Wood (1920), his first book of criticism, made his name.

In 1921, exhausted and close to breakdown, he took leave from the bank and finished The Waste Land at a sanatorium in Lausanne. Pound edited the manuscript drastically. The poem was published in 1922 in Eliot’s own new quarterly, The Criterion, and in The Dial in New York, and as a book with Eliot’s notes, and it made him famous.

In 1925 he joined the publishing house of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber) as an editor and director, where for forty years he shaped modern British poetry, publishing Auden, Spender, MacNeice, Ted Hughes and many others.

Conversion

In 1927 Eliot was baptised and confirmed in the Church of England and became a British subject. His later poetry is religious: “Journey of the Magi” (1927), Ash-Wednesday (1930), and the verse plays Murder in the Cathedral (1935), on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket (“The last temptation is the greatest treason: / To do the right deed for the wrong reason”), and The Family Reunion. His crowning achievement, Four Quartets — “Burnt Norton” (1936), “East Coker” (1940), “The Dry Salvages” (1941) and “Little Gidding” (1942) — four long meditative poems, each named for a place, explores time, memory, the soul’s purification and the meeting of time and eternity, ending with Julian of Norwich’s words: “And all shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well / When the tongues of flame are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one.” He also wrote whimsical verse for children, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), which became Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats (1981).

In later life he wrote successful West End verse comedies (The Cocktail Party, 1949) and cultural criticism. In 1957, at sixty-eight, he married Valerie Fletcher, his secretary, thirty-eight years younger, and was happy at last. He died in London on 4 January 1965; his ashes are in the church of St Michael at East Coker, Somerset, the village from which his ancestors had emigrated, with the lines “In my beginning is my end… In my end is my beginning.”

Criticism

Eliot’s essays transformed criticism. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) argued that a poet must have “the historical sense”, a perception “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”; that the whole of European literature “has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order”, which each new work modifies; and that poetry should be impersonal — the poet’s mind is like a catalyst, a “shred of platinum” in which emotions combine into something new. In “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919) he called Hamlet “most certainly an artistic failure” and defined the objective correlative. In “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) he praised Donne’s fusion of thought and feeling and diagnosed a “dissociation of sensibility” in English poetry after Milton. His taste — for Donne, the Jacobean dramatists, Dante, the French Symbolists; against Milton and the Romantics — shaped the New Criticism and university English for decades.

Controversies

Eliot’s work contains antisemitic passages (“Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”, “Gerontion”), and in a 1933 lecture (After Strange Gods) he said that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” Critics such as Anthony Julius have argued that this antisemitism is integral to his work; others see it as a prejudice of his class and time that he later regretted. His treatment of Vivienne has also been sharply judged.

Legacy

Eliot dominated English poetry from the 1920s to the 1950s; later poets, from the Movement to Ted Hughes, reacted against his difficulty and allusiveness, but his phrases — “April is the cruellest month”, “the still point of the turning world”, “not with a bang but a whimper”, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” — are part of the language. His letters to Emily Hale, opened in 2020, revealed a long, unconsummated love.

In conversation

• “Not with a bang but a whimper” — for an inglorious ending.
• “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” — a life of timid routine.
• “Human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” — from Four Quartets.
• The objective correlative — the concrete image or situation that carries an emotion in art.