Thomas Stearns Eliot (T.S.Eliot)( 26 Sept. 1888-4 Jan. 1965)
- A literary genius.
“Every moment is a fresh beginning.”-T. S. ELIOT, The Cocktail Party
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) considered that language and person have relation of “ A servant of language rather than master of it”; it depicts the profound influence of the 14th Century Philosopher ‘Dante’ who propounded that Art & Literature should not only have beauty but also should be essentially didactic.
Eliot, a modernist, Calvanist English philanthropist who settled in United States of America(USA) , was educated at Oxford University in England where he wrote he wrote a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley, (whose Hegelian vision of society exerted a profound influence over him), and Harvard University of USA and Sorborne University in France. He was the son of the son of Henry Ware Eliot, president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, and Charlotte Champe Stearns, a former teacher, an energetic social work volunteer at the Humanity Club of St. Louis and grandson of the founder (Mr. William Greenleaf Eliot Jr 1) of Washington University at St.Louis in United States of America.
Eliot as an editor
In 1922 Eliot founded the’Criterion’ a literary quarterly which was a forum for many prominent writers, which he continued to edit until 1939, when he discontinued the journal under the pressure of "depression of spirits" induced by "the present state of public affairs." and remained editor of magazine ,’Egoist’. As editor at ‘Faber and Faber’, Eliot promoted the work of many younger writers, including W.H. Auden and Djuna Barnes, although his conservative politics, expressed most bizarrely in After Strange Gods(1934), were at odds with the views of leading younger writers of the 1930's. Eliot believed that, “Religion and Law are great conservative influences of society and that all great social changes, in order to be beneficial must be slow in progress.”
As an Intellectual, Eliot, who was deeply inclined to learn worldly philosophies and literary theories of Ancient Past, Medieval and Contemporaries put all his sincere efforts in it.
He was inspired and influenced by a lot many people. Some of the most prominent influences include his grandfather for his principles of morality and self indulgence in life and his mother for sincerity and sense of duty. The natural scenic beauty of St. Louis and Missippi were the 2 places that influenced him.
Two of his professors namely, Irving Babbit and George Satyanna left an everlasting impact on Eliot. Babbit’s literary criticism was taken up by Eliot and it was on Babbit’s motivation that Eliot took up studies of Sanskrit and Pali.
Eliot’s Poetry
Eliot’s poetry is known for obscurity, condensed oblique expression and with necessary links often omitted, and depicts state of minds.
‘Prufrock and other observations’ was Eliot’s first major literary output. It was influenced by French symbolist movement. It is a poem that portrays contemptuous and often witty ironical satire, the satire and boredom, emptiness and pessimism of its own day.
‘Rhapsody of a windy night’ reflects Physicist Henry Bergson’s influence on Eliot. Bergson’s theories of ‘fluidity of time’ and intuition and consciousness is portrayed in this poem.
‘The Waste land’ – a poem in 5 parts ; having such influential lines as “April is the cruellest month”... “ Datta, Damayanta.Dayadhwam... Shantih, Shantih,Shantih.” , This poem forms a prosaic poem that depicts sterility in modern life and contrasts past. It is a landmark poem in modernism of literature. The waste Land has multiple speakers, speaking in hallucinatory state of consciousness. It is a poem showing ways in which spiritual dryness can be perceived through words, “London bridge is falling down...”, and “Fear in a handful of dust”. The Waste Land is unquestionably one of the most important poems of the twentieth century. Its importance lies in its literary excellence—its insight and originality—and in its influence on other poets. Although Eliot said that he always wrote with his mind firmly on tradition, The Waste Land broke with the look, the sound, and the subject of most poetry written since the early nineteenth century. In the poem, allusions to myth, religion, Western and Eastern literature, and popular culture are almost constant; in fact, many stretches of the poem are direct, and unacknowledged, quotations from other sources. Because no one narrator appears to be speaking the poem, the work seems as impersonal as a crowded London street. The five sections of The Waste Land also constitute Eliot’s “objective correlative,” a chain of events that sparks a particular emotional mood. The mood is one of despair, loneliness, and confusion—the central feelings, Eliot believed, of modern city dwellers.
Allegorical poem of Eliot include ‘Hollow men’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’ which has references of medieval mysticism and lacks clear logical structure.
A Noble prize winner in literature for his poem “The Waste Land”; Thomas Stearns Eliot is known for his originality in his symbolist and obscure imagery. Eliot himself described his method of working as, “doing things separately, and then seeing the possibility of fusing them together, altering them, and making a kind of whole of them. The critic I. A. Richards influentially praised Eliot for describing the shared post-war “sense of desolation, of uncertainty, of futility, of the groundlessness of aspirations, of the vanity of endeavour, and a thirst for a life-giving water which seems suddenly to have failed.”
Eliot’s age can be seen as a symbolic of an entry into mid-life. It was at 33, “in the middle of our life’s way,” that Dante had the vision of heaven and hell recorded in his Divine Comedy. It was at the same age that Christ was crucified. His death and resurrection form a major symbolic framework for The Waste Land. Although its first lines suggest an aversion to “mixing / Memory with desire” and to “stirring / Dull roots with spring rain,” the poem’s success results largely from Eliot’s ability to mix modes and tones. The originality of The Waste Land, and its importance for most poetry in English since 1922, lies in Eliot’s ability to meld a deep awareness of literary tradition with the experimentalism of free verse, to fuse private and public meanings, and to combine moments of lyric intensity into a poem of epic scope.
In 1910 and 1911 Eliot copied into a leather notebook the poems that would establish his reputation: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "La Figlia Che Piange," "Preludes," and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." Combining some of the robustness of Robert Browning's monologues with the incantatory elegance of symbolist verse, and compacting Laforgue's poetry of alienation with the moral earnestness of what Eliot once called "Boston doubt," these poems explore the subtleties of the unconscious with a caustic wit. Their effect was both unique and compelling, and their assurance staggered his contemporaries who were privileged to read them in manuscript. Aiken, for example, marveled at "how sharp and complete and sui generis the whole thing was, from the outset. The wholeness is there, from the very beginning."
In the fall of 1911, though, Eliot was as preoccupied with ideas as with literature. A student in what has been called the golden age of Harvard philosophy, he worked amid a group that included Santayana, William James, the visiting Bertrand Russell, and Josiah Royce. Under Royce's direction, Eliot wrote a dissertation on Bergson's neoidealist critic F. H. Bradley and produced a searching philosophical critique of the psychology of consciousness. He also deepened his reading in anthropology and religion, and took almost as many courses in Sanskrit and Hindu thought as he did in philosophy. By 1914, when he left on a traveling fellowship to Europe, he had persuaded a number of Harvard's philosophers to regard him as a potential colleague.
It is for this reason Thomas Stearns Eliot is known as a writer with Baudelaire, Flaubert, F.H.Bradely, Lafourge, Babbit, Satyana, Frazer – fused into one new shinning star. Inspired by John Davidson’s style of projection of inhumanity in modern city, which he cited in his work ‘City of Dreadful Night’; Eliot has used it in his work ‘The Waste Land’, ‘Dry Savages’, to communicate powerfully the sense of horror in a colloquial diction.
Baudelaire’s influence on Eliot ,as he puts it, “ a precedent for my poetical possibilities”... “helped me to get my poetical material “...Lafourge’s style of speech of poetic style is ingrained in Eliot’s poetry.
“Eliot is second Shakespeare because, like Shakespeare, Eliot had many sources for his poetic creation”.
Eliot as an Essayist
As an Essayist, Eliot is known by his major work, titled, “The Sacred Wood” and “The Idea of Christian Society”, and “Hamlet and His Problems”.
. These essays speak about induced mood of depression and new criticism. The Sacred Wood is a collection of 20 essays by T. S. Eliot, first published in 1920. Topics include Eliot's opinions of many literary works and authors, including Shakespeare's play Hamlet, and the poets Dante and Blake. The central essay in The Sacred Wood is “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Most fascinating in an initial reading of this essay is Eliot’s circling, complex definition of literary tradition. It is not, he claims, a dead collection of writings by dead poets, “a lump, an indiscriminate bolus”; neither is it a body of work from which a few personal favourites can be chosen as exemplars of excellence. Instead, it is a complete order, an organic body in which each part (individual poem) relates to and derives its significance from its place in the whole (tradition).This celebration of order and overarching structure may seem odd coming from the creator of The Waste Land (1922) and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), works defined by their fragmented nature and their rapid shifts in tone and form. It is a theme, however, that runs throughout ‘The Sacred Wood’. In his 1928 introduction to the work, Eliot declares that the collection’s main focus “is the problem of the integrity of poetry” its orderly, unified nature. In “Dante,” an essay dealing with the seeming inability of modern poets to create philosophical poetry on the order of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Eliot writes that “the artistic emotion presented by any episode of the Comedy is dependent upon the whole”. In summing up the Italian poet’s unparalleled achievement, Eliot writes, “It is one of the greatest merits of Dante’s poem that the vision is so nearly complete; it is evidence of this greatness that the significance of any single passage, of any of the passages that are selected as ‘poetry,’ is incomplete unless we ourselves apprehend the whole”. In Dante, Eliot argues, there is complete interpenetration of part and whole, detail and structure. In “The Perfect Critic,” Eliot attacks what he calls “impressionistic criticism,” the criticism of those who cannot relate their momentary, transient aesthetic experiences to the entire work of art. The task of the critic, Eliot writes in his introduction, is “to see literature steadily and to see it whole”
One of his most important prose works, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" which was originally published in two parts in The Egoist, is a part of the The Sacred Wood collection.
While Eliot is most often known for his poetry, he also contributed to the field of literary criticism. In this dual role, he acted as poet-critic, comparable to Sir Philip Sidney and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is one of the more well known works that Eliot produced in his critic capacity. It formulates Eliot's influential conception of the relationship between the poet and the literary tradition which precedes them.
T.S.Eliot as a critic
According to Eliot, the end of criticism is to bring readjustment between the old and the new. He says:
“From time to time it is desirable, that some critic shall appear to review the past of our literature, and set the poets and the poems in a new order.”
Such critics are rare, for they must possess, besides ability for judgment, powerful liberty of mind to identify and interpret its own values and category of admiration for their generation. John Hayward says:
“Matthew Arnold was such a critic as were Coleridge and Johnson and Dryden before him; and such, in our own day, is Eliot himself.”
"The Frontiers of Criticism" is a lecture given by T. S. Eliot at the University of Minnesota in 1956. It was reprinted in On Poetry and Poets, a collection of Eliot's critical essays, in 1957. The essay is an attempt by Eliot to define the boundaries of literary criticism: to say what does, and what does not, constitute truly literary criticism, as opposed to, for example, a study in history based upon a work of literature. The essay is significant because it represents Eliot's response to the New Critical perspective which had taken the academic study of literature by storm during Eliot's lifetime. It also presents an analysis of some of its author's own poetic works, an unusual characteristic for modern criticism—it has become far more usual today for poets and critics to be in separate camps, rather than united in one individual. Perhaps even more importantly, it demonstrates the progress and change in Eliot's own critical thought over the years between 1919 and 1956. In “The Frontiers of Criticism,” Eliot articulates a critical philosophy that argues against the contextual analysis of poetry as a necessary condition to understanding and appreciation. That is to say, he believes that to understand a poem, one should ignore everything considered “extraneous:” the writer’s autobiography, his or her historical moment, as well as the social, economic, cultural, and historical contexts of production. Eliot worries: “[A] knowledge of the springs which released a poem is not necessarily a help toward understanding the poem: too much information about the origins of a poem may even break contact with it”5 This sensibility may work for understanding a poem like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” But then again, the theory fails for those poems which differ from Eliot’s own in terms of content and style.
Eliot’s criticism offers both reassessment and reaction to earlier writers. He called himself “a classicist in literature”. His vital contribution is the reaction against romanticism and humanism which brought a classical revival in art and criticism. He rejected the romantic view of the individual’s perfectibility, stressed the doctrine of the original sin and exposed the futility of the romantic faith in the “Inner Voice”. Instead of following his ‘inner voice’, a critic must follow objective standards and must conform to tradition. A sense of tradition, respect for order and authority is central to Eliot’s classicism. He sought to correct the excesses of “the abstract and intellectual” school of criticism represented by Arnold. He sought to raise criticism to the level of science. In his objectivity and logical attitude, Eliot most closely resembles Aristotle. A. G. George says:
“Eliot’s theory of the impersonality of poetry is the greatest theory on the nature of the process after Wordsworth’s romantic conception of poetry.”
Primary works of literary criticism by T. S. Eliot
1-The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London Menthuen, 1950.
2- Tradition and the Individual Talent;
3-Hamlet and His Problems
The poet, critic, playwrite and publisher, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), wrote a short piece of fiction entitled "Eeldrop and Appleplex" was the adult Eliot's only piece of published fiction.
The work was originally published in two parts in 1917 in The Little Review literary magazine. The citations are:
- Eliot, T.S. "Eeldrop and Appleplex." The Little Review. [New York] vol. IV, no. 1 (May, 1917) pp. 7-11.
- Eliot, T.S. "Eeldrop and Appleplex." The Little Review. [New York] vol. IV, no. 5 (September, 1917) pp. 16-9.
Eliot is often claimed by the New Critics as one of their founding fathers, an "honor" he rejected for much the same reasons that he avoided explicit theorising on the subject of literature: namely, because of his conception of the only true criticism as that of a poet trying to better his art. In some of his work, Eliot had espoused the idea of criticism as necessarily impersonal.
The evaluation of Eliot's criticism occurred relatively early; for example, an appraisal of his work focusing exclusively on Eliot the critic (as opposed to Eliot the poet) appeared in 1941 in a book by John Crowe Ransom. Ransom, participating in the New Critical tradition of borrowing from Eliot, writes that
“One of the best things in his influence has been his habit of considering aesthetic effect as independent of religious effect, or moral, or political and social; as an end that is beyond and not co-ordinate with these”
This is quite similar to the New Critical attitudes of such authors as W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. In their theories of literary criticism, it is of vital importance to separate the work in question from all other factors, both on the side of creation (i.e., the writer's intentions) and on that of consumption (the reader's reactions).
Eliot as a Dramatist
After the Second World War, Eliot, now an influential literary editor, left lyric poetry behind in order to write increasingly mainstream drama. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
Eliot’s dramas are known as next to Elizabethan dramas. The notable ones being ‘The Rock’, ‘The Family reunion’, ‘Murder in the Cathedral’, ‘Confidential Clerk’, ‘The Cocktail Party’, ‘The Elder Statesman’. Murder in the Cathedral is a verse drama by T. S. Eliot that portrays the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, first performed in 1935. Eliot drew heavily on the writing of Edward Grim, a clerk who is believed to be an eyewitness to the event. The action occurs between 2 and 29 December 1170, chronicling the days leading up to the martyrdom of Thomas Becket following his absence of seven years in France. Becket's internal struggle is the main focus of the play.
The book is divided into two parts. Part one takes place in the Archbishop Thomas Becket's hall on 2 December 1170. The play begins with a Chorus singing, foreshadowing the coming violence. The Chorus is a key part of the drama, with its voice changing and developing during the play, offering comments about the action and providing a link between the audience and the characters and action, as in Greek drama. Three priests are present, and they reflect on the absence of Becket and the rise of temporal power. A herald announces Becket’s arrival. Becket is immediately reflective about his coming martyrdom, which he embraces, and which is understood to be a sign of his own selfishness—his fatal weakness. The tempters arrive, three of whom parallel the Temptations of Christ. Part II of the play takes place in the Archbishop's Hall and in the Cathedral, 29 December 1170. Four knights arrive with "Urgent business" from the king. These knights had heard the king speak of his frustration with Becket, and had interpreted this as an order to kill Becket. They accuse him of betrayal, and he claims to be loyal. He tells them to accuse him in public, and they make to attack him, but priests intervene. The priests insist that he leave and protect himself, but he refuses. The knights leave and Becket again says he is ready to die. The chorus sings that they knew this conflict was coming, that it had long been in the fabric of their lives, both temporal and spiritual. The chorus again reflects on the coming devastation. Thomas is taken to the Cathedral, where the knights break in and kill him. The chorus laments: “Clean the air! Clean the sky!", and "The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts and ourselves defiled with blood." At the close of the play, the knights step up, address the audience, and defend their actions. The murder was all right and for the best: it was in the right spirit, sober, and justified so that the church's power would not undermine stability and state power.
The play, dealing with an individual's opposition to authority, was written at the time of rising fascism in Central Europe.
Some material that the producer asked Eliot to remove or replace during the writing was transformed into the poem "Burnt Norton"
Eliot spent much of the last half of his career writing one kind of drama or another, and attempting to reach (and bring together) a larger and more varied audience. As early as 1923 he had written parts of an experimental and striking jazz play, ‘Sweeney Agonistes’ (never finished, it was published in fragments in 1932 and performed by actors in masks by London's Group Theatre in 1934). In early 1934 he composed a church pageant with accompanying choruses entitled ‘The Rock’, performed in May and June 1934 at Sadler's Wells. Almost immediately following these performances, Bishop Bell commissioned a church drama having to do with Canterbury Cathedral, which, as ‘Murder in the Cathedral’, was performed in the Chapter House at Canterbury in June 1935 and was moved to the Mercury Theatre at Notting Hill Gate in November and eventually to the Old Vic. In the late 1930s, Eliot attempted to conflate a drama of spiritual crisis with a Noël Coward-inspired contemporary theater of social manners. Though Eliot based ‘The Family Reunion’ on the plot of ‘Aeschylus's Eumenides’, he designed it to tell a story of Christian redemption. The play opened in the West End in March 1939 and closed to mixed reviews five weeks later. Eliot was disheartened, but after the war fashioned more popular (though less powerful) combinations of the same elements to much greater success. ‘The Cocktail Party’, modernizing ‘Euripides's Alcestis’ with some of the insouciance of Noël Coward, with a cast that included Alec Guinness, opened to a warm critical reception at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1949 and enjoyed popular success starting on Broadway in January 1950. Eliot's last two plays were more labored and fared less well. 'The Confidential Clerk’ had a respectable run at the Lyric Theatre in London in September 1953, and ‘The Elder Statesman’ premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1958 and closed after a lukewarm run in London in the fall..
For many readers, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) is synonymous with modernism. Everything about his poetry bespeaks high modernism: its use of myth to undergird and order atomized modern experience; its collage-like juxtaposition of different voices, traditions, and discourses; and its focus on form as the carrier of meaning. His critical prose set the aesthetic standards for the New Criticism, and his journal Criterion was one of the primary arbiters of taste throughout the 1920’s and 1930’s. Eliot’s wide-ranging but relatively small corpus of work – the precocious “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), the seminal The Waste Land (1922), and the later Four Quartets (1943), which Eliot considered his masterpiece – has made him the primary figure of modernist poetry both for his peers and for subsequent generations.
It is from these critical observations it can be derived that Eliot can be considered as a pioneer in modern age writings in English language and a literary genius in true sense.
Eliot’s soul got relieved from his body on 4 January 1965 and his body was buried in East Coker from where his ancestor named Andrew Eliot had emigrated to USA .
Eliot’s contribution to the literature of English language has immortalized himself.
1- http://wustl.edu/about/history/
