—T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot, a major twentieth-century poet, has had a significance and an influence far beyond his own time. Not only do his works continue to inform contemporary literature, but his critical insights still have great impact on people in our own time. In this chapter, I introduce Eliot and explore his thought and beliefs.
Life
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September, 1888, in St Louis, the city that looks East and West and North and South across the North America continent. The youngest of Henry Ware Eliot’s seven children, he enrolled in Harvard in 1906, when he was 18. The President of Harvard at the time, Charles William Eliot, was a cousin of his grandfather. He took his bachelor’s degree in 1909, his master’s the following year. In 1911, Eliot returned to Harvard from Paris to concentrated not on poetry, but on philosophy, in search for roots, for the source of ultimate meaning (Tamplin, 1988:21).
In 1915, Eliot married his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood (1888-1947), an ebullient but insecure and persistently ill woman, despite his family’s disapproval. “[I]f Vivien was neurotic to the point of helplessness and often ill, [and] near to death,” observes one of his biographers, “Eliot seemed to be blighther vivacity by a fastidious nervousness and neurotic exhaustion of his own.” (Tamplin, 1988:23-25) Denied the chance of being a freelance writer
by the duties of taking care of his sick wife, Eliot went to work at Lloyds Bank in 1917. “The difficulty for the poet,” he wrote in 1919, “is that public success is built upon surrendering private utterances—the veiled interior meanings of the poems” and, for the poet, revelation is always accessible, yet he may “frustrate its recognition by advancing a theory of the artist’s impersonality, poetry as ‘an escape from personality’.”4 In 1922, his intelligence and unremitting work as a critic and poet led him to found The Criterion5, of which he served as editor from 1922 until 1939 and the first issue of which featured his poem, The Waste Land6. (Tamplin, 1988)
Eliot received the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1948, for “his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry” (Frenz, 1969). Afterwards, he was “for a decade or more the undisputed literary dictator of London” (Kenner, 1962). Living in England during World War I, Eliot witnessed first-hand the collapse of civilization, and the poem The Waste
Land, which captured the state of culture and society after the war. “The long, fragmented
structure of The Waste Land contained so many technical innovations that ideas of what poetry was and how it worked seemed fundamentally changed.” (Levine et al., 2012) the Romanticism of the late nineteenth century, with its emphasis on emotion and individualism and glorification of the past and of nature, withered in the face of the recurring wars of the early twentieth century, and was replaced by doubt and insecurity. Modernism, as a literary movement, represents the breakdown of traditional society, which had seemed so firmly established before the war, and it is the philosophy first recognized and developed in Eliot’s 1917 poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
4 “I am suggesting in a way, that for Eliot the true escape, the true impersonality, was business, in banking and later, more congenially, in publishing. It was as much shelter as deviation from his calling as poet, which was the utmost rigour.” (Tamplin, 1988) Eliot in the reality has so many roles to play, yet the only role he could make him more like a man is “poet”.
5 The Criterion was a British literary magazine published from October 1922 to January 1939.
6 A long poem by T. S. Eliot, and it is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry.
[Modernism] involves deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases...[and]
its thinkers...[question] the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social organization, religion, and morality and also traditional ways of conceiving the human self...The year 1922 was signalized by the simultaneous appearance of such monuments of modernist innovation as James Joyce’s Ulysses [and] T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land [because] the catastrophe of the war has shaken faith in the continuity of Western civilization and raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literary modes. (Abrams, 2011:167)
During the war, the modernist poets expressed their uncertainties about society in their works, but the modernist movement was soon challenged by a counter-movement that came to be labelled “post-modernism,” as observed by Roland Barthes, a significant critic and philosopher of the twentieth century. According to his essay, “The Death of the Author,” we do not deal with the creator (“author”) of a work once the work is created, for thereafter the life of the work belongs to the reader, interpreting the work himself instead of consulting the author. In other words, it is impossible for us to find “Eliot” by reading Eliot’s works, that is to say, it is impossible to know and to reach Eliot’s intentions through our reading. The first publication of The Waste Land in 1922, in The Criterion and The Dial, was the edition with no footnotes, and this gave critics and readers the chance to “extend” the poem, to communicate with the poem itself. The subsequent republication of the poem in a book, however, added footnotes to the complex texture of the poem. With the footnotes, this poem was explicitly explained and clarified by Eliot, the author himself and, to Postmodernists, this was seen as the author cutting in and interrupting the relationship between the work and its
readers, depriving them of the experience of guessing and thinking. On the other hand, it was a chance for those readers to know the poet’s real thoughts.
In 1927, Eliot adopted the established religion of England, the country in which he had lived since 1914. His 17th-century English ancestor, Andrew Eliot, had become a puritan;
Eliot’s grandfather, on the other hand, had left Massachusetts as a missionary for the Unitarian Church. As one of his literary biographers observes:
The colours of this background, remotely Puritan and proximately Unitarian, never left him...For both elements of his religious heritage indicate points of view — disposition—that survive his conversion into the ampler communion of the Church of England. Religious questions preoccupied Eliot during most of his life...and some of the effects...produced both in his poetry and his criticism. (Tamplin, 1988, p. 35)
For the following years, Eliot dedicated himself to poetry and criticism, and in October 1964 he collapsed, paralyzed down the left side, and went into a coma. He died at home on 4 January 1965.