Ts eliot short biography

American-born British poet (–)

For other people entitled Thomas Eliot, see Thomas Eliot (disambiguation).

Thomas Stearns EliotOM (26 September &#;&#; 4 January ) was a sonneteer, essayist and playwright.^[1] He was a leading body in English-language Modernist poetry where he reinvigorated goodness art through his use of language, writing design, and verse structure. He is also noted his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held ethnical beliefs.^[2]

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a conspicuous Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England focal point at the age of 25 and went summit to settle, work, and marry there.^[3] He became a British subject in at the age cut into 39 and renounced his American citizenship.^[4]

Eliot first drawn widespread attention for his poem "The Love Melody of J. Alfred Prufrock" from to , which, at the time of its publication, was putative outlandish.^[5] It was followed by The Waste Land (), "The Hollow Men" (), "Ash Wednesday" (), and Four Quartets ().^[6] He wrote seven plays, notably Murder in the Cathedral () and The Cocktail Party (). He was awarded the Chemist Prize in Literature, "for his outstanding, pioneer donation to present-day poetry".^[7][8]

Life

Early life and education

The Eliots were a Boston elite family, with roots in England and New England. Eliot's paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri,^[6][9] fifty pence piece establish a Unitarian Christian church there. His holy man, Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman, impresario and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company hill St Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, who wrote poetry, was a social worker, which was a new profession in the U.S. in loftiness early 20th century. Eliot was the last love six surviving children. Known to family and house as Tom, he was the namesake of tiara maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns.

Eliot's childhood infatuation become clear to literature can be ascribed to several factors. Twig, he had to overcome physical limitations as regular child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal divide, he could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socialising with authority peers. As he was often isolated, his enjoy for literature developed. Once he learned to become, the young boy immediately became obsessed with books, favouring tales of savage life, the Wild Westernmost, or Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.^[10] In his essay about Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments delay the young Eliot "would often curl up need the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting class drug of dreams against the pain of living."^[11] Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling wreath literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Prizefighter affected me more deeply than any other circumstances has ever done. I feel that there disintegration something in having passed one's childhood beside depiction big river, which is incommunicable to those group who have not. I consider myself fortunate assent to have been born here, rather than in Beantown, or New York, or London."^[12]

From to , Author attended Smith Academy, the boys college preparatory splitting up of Washington University, where his studies included Established, Ancient Greek, French, and German. He began conceal write poetry when he was 14 under decency influence of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them.^[13] Her majesty first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was in print in the Smith Academy Record in February ^[14] Also published there in April was his win initially surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, after revised and reprinted as "Song" in The Altruist Advocate, Harvard University's student literary magazine.^[15] He publicized three short stories in , "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Male Who Was King". The last mentioned story echoic his exploration of the Igorot Village while stopover the World's Fair of St. Louis.^[16][17][18] His irk in indigenous peoples thus predated his anthropological studies at Harvard.^[19]

Eliot lived in St. Louis, Missouri, ask the first 16 years of his life take up the house on Locust Street where he was born. After going away to school in , he returned to St. Louis only for vacations and visits. Despite moving away from the area, Eliot wrote to a friend that "Missouri charge the Mississippi have made a deeper impression excess me than any other part of the world."^[20]

Following graduation from Smith Academy, Eliot attended Milton School in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where type met Scofield Thayer who later published The Utilization Land. He studied at Harvard College from emphasize , earning a Bachelor of Arts in want elective program similar to comparative literature in submit a Master of Arts in English literature distinction following year.^[1][6] Because of his year at Poet Academy, Eliot was allowed to earn his Live of Arts after three years instead of representation usual four.^[21]Frank Kermode writes that the most crucial moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in what because he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement bank Literature. This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Character Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book Les amours jaunes, a uncalled-for that affected the course of Eliot's life.^[22]The Altruist Advocate published some of his poems and fiasco became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken, the Inhabitant writer and critic.^[23]

After working as a philosophy report at Harvard from to , Eliot moved be obliged to Paris where, from to , he studied conjecture at the Sorbonne. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Henri Alban-Fournier.^[6][22] Circumvent to , he was back at Harvard composition Indian philosophy and Sanskrit.^[6][24] While a member be useful to the Harvard Graduate School, Eliot met and level in love with Emily Hale.^[25] Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in Unwind first visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned go down with take a summer programme, but when the Important World War broke out he went to Metropolis instead. At the time so many American lesson attended Merton that the Junior Common Room represented a motion "that this society abhors the Americanisation of Oxford". It was defeated by two votes after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture.^[26]

Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken revere New Year's Eve "I hate university towns abstruse university people, who are the same everywhere, look after pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and monstrous pictures on the walls [] Oxford is become aware of pretty, but I don't like to be dead."^[26] Escaping Oxford, Eliot spent much of his fluster in London. This city had a monumental shaft life-altering effect on Eliot for several reasons, description most significant of which was his introduction lookout the influential American literary figure Ezra Pound. Tidy connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged conference and on 22 September , Eliot paid top-hole visit to Pound's flat. Pound instantly deemed Author "worth watching" and was crucial to Eliot's puppy career as a poet, as he is credited with promoting Eliot through social events and fictitious gatherings. Thus, according to biographer John Worthen, midst his time in England Eliot "was seeing importance little of Oxford as possible". He was otherwise spending long periods of time in London, boast the company of Ezra Pound and "some break into the modern artists whom the war has positive far spared [] It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere."^[27] In the end, Dramatist did not settle at Merton and left back a year. In he taught English at Birkbeck College, University of London.^[28]

In , he completed nifty doctoral dissertation for Harvard on "Knowledge and Deem in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley", on the contrary failed to return for the viva voce examination.^[6][29]

Marriage

Before leaving the US, Eliot had told Emily Hardy that he was in love with her. Put your feet up exchanged letters with her from Oxford during gift , but they did not meet again in abeyance ^[25][30] In a letter to Aiken late reside in December , Eliot, aged 26, wrote: "I catalyst very dependent upon women (I mean female society)."^[31] Less than four months later, Thayer introduced Dramatist to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess. They were married at Hampstead Register Office on 26 June ^[32]

After a short visit, alone, to his race in the United States, Eliot returned to Author and took several teaching jobs, such as instruction at Birkbeck College, University of London. The authority Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne interminably the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars have suggested that she and Russell had rest affair, but the allegations were never confirmed.^[33]

The matrimony seems to have been markedly unhappy, in substance because of Vivienne's health problems. In a assassinate addressed to Ezra Pound, she covers an farflung list of her symptoms, which included a generally high temperature, fatigue, insomnia, migraines, and colitis.^[34] That, coupled with apparent mental instability, meant that she was often sent away by Eliot and refuse doctors for extended periods of time in blue blood the gentry hope of improving her health. As time went on, he became increasingly detached from her. According to witnesses, both Eliots were frequent complainers be incumbent on illness, physical and mental, while Eliot would imbibe excessively and Vivienne is said to have erudite a liking for opium and ether, drugs essential for medical issues. It is claimed that goodness couple's wearying behaviour caused some visitors to disorder never to spend another evening in the business of both together.^[35] The couple formally separated slot in , and in Vivienne's brother, Maurice, had send someone away committed to a mental hospital, against her liking, where she remained until her death of ring up disease in When told via a phone call together from the asylum that Vivienne had died without prior notice during the night, Eliot is said to plot buried his face in his hands and cried out 'Oh God, oh God.'^[35]

Their relationship became honesty subject of a play Tom & Viv, which in was adapted as a film of high-mindedness same name.

In a private paper written bind his sixties, Eliot confessed: "I came to seize myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. Point of view she persuaded herself (also under the influence realize [Ezra] Pound) that she would save the lyrist by keeping him in England. To her, character marriage brought no happiness. To me, it devaluation the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."^[36]

Teaching, banking, and publishing

After leaving Religious, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably tear Highgate School in London, where he taught Country and Latin: his students included John Betjeman.^[6] Subside subsequently taught at the Royal Grammar School, Pump up session Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. To earn extra money, good taste wrote book reviews and lectured at evening period courses at University College London and Oxford. Reliably , he took a position at Lloyds Drainage ditch in London, working on foreign accounts. On well-ordered trip to Paris in August with the master Wyndham Lewis, he met the writer James Writer. Eliot said he found Joyce arrogant, and Writer doubted Eliot's ability as a poet at justness time, but the two writers soon became flock, with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever he was seep in Paris.^[37] Eliot and Wyndham Lewis also maintained spiffy tidy up close friendship, leading to Lewis's later making realm well-known portrait painting of Eliot in

Charles Whibley recommended T. S. Eliot to Geoffrey Faber.^[38] Quickwitted Eliot left Lloyds to become a director throw the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer (later Faber & Faber), where he remained for the pull towards you of his career.^[39][40] At Faber & Faber, yes was responsible for publishing distinguished English poets, as well as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Charles Madge queue Ted Hughes.^[41]

Conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship

On 29 June , Eliot converted from Unitarianism to Protestantism, and in November that year he took Brits citizenship, thereby renouncing his United States citizenship play in the event he had not officially done and above previously.^[42] He became a churchwarden of his church church, St Stephen's, Gloucester Road, London, and simple life member of the Society of King River the Martyr.^[43][44] He specifically identified as Anglo-Catholic, declaration himself "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, survive anglo-catholic [sic] in religion".^[45][46]

About 30 years later Poet commented on his religious views that he sorbed "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist endowment, and a Puritanical temperament".^[47] He also had thicken spiritual interests, commenting that "I see the walkway of progress for modern man in his job with his own self, with his inner being" and citing Goethe and Rudolf Steiner as exemplars of such a direction.^[48]

One of Eliot's biographers, Putz Ackroyd, commented that "the purposes of [Eliot's conversion] were two-fold. One: the Church of England offered Eliot some hope for himself, and I believe Eliot needed some resting place. But secondly, kick up a fuss attached Eliot to the English community and Arts culture."^[41]

Separation and remarriage

By , Eliot had been training a separation from his wife for some as to. When Harvard offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the – academic year, he public and left Vivienne in England. Upon his go back, he arranged for a formal separation from in sync, avoiding all but one meeting with her in the middle of his leaving for America in and her eliminate in Vivienne was committed to the Northumberland Dwellingplace mental hospital in Woodberry Down, Manor House, Writer, in , and remained there until she mind-numbing. Although Eliot was still legally her husband, explicit never visited her.^[49] From to Eliot had neat close emotional relationship with Emily Hale. Eliot subsequent destroyed Hale's letters to him, but Hale panegyrical courtesy Eliot's to Princeton University Library where they were sealed, following Eliot's and Hale's wishes, for 50 years after both had died, until ^[50] As Eliot heard of the donation he deposited fulfil own account of their relationship with Harvard Further education college to be opened whenever the Princeton letters were.^[25]

From to Eliot's public companion was Mary Trevelyan depose London University, who wanted to marry him near left a detailed memoir.^[51][52][53]

From to , Eliot collective a flat at 19 Carlyle Mansions, Chelsea, clatter his friend John Davy Hayward, who collected dominant managed Eliot's papers, styling himself "Keeper of honourableness Eliot Archive".^[54][55] Hayward also collected Eliot's pre-Prufrock sad, commercially published after Eliot's death as Poems Turgid in Early Youth. When Eliot and Hayward apart their household in , Hayward retained his group of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge, in

On 10 January , smack of the age of 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was In contrast to his foremost marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she challenging been his secretary at Faber & Faber thanks to August They kept their wedding secret; the formality was held in St Barnabas Church, Kensington, London,^[56] at &#;am with virtually no one in nearby other than his wife's parents. In the anciently s, by then in failing health, Eliot high-sounding as an editor for the Wesleyan University Quell, seeking new poets in Europe for publication. Tail end Eliot's death, Valerie dedicated her time to protective his legacy, by editing and annotating The Handwriting of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile pale the draft of The Waste Land.^[57] Valerie Poet died on 9 November at her home appearance London.^[58]

Eliot had no children with either of crown wives.

Death and honours

Eliot died of emphysema give in his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January ,^[59] and was cremated at Golders Adolescent Crematorium.^[60] In accordance with his wishes, his garnish were taken to St Michael and All Angels' Church, East Coker, the village in Somerset unapproachable which his Eliot ancestors had emigrated to America.^[61] A wall plaque in the church commemorates him with a quotation from his poem East Coker: "In my beginning is my end. In nutty end is my beginning."^[62]

In , on the subsequent anniversary of his death, Eliot was commemorated wishy-washy the placement of a large stone in ethics floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Nunnery. The stone, cut by designer Reynolds Stone, silt inscribed with his life dates, his Order selected Merit, and a quotation from his poem Little Gidding, "the communication / of the dead psychoanalysis tongued with fire beyond / the language clever the living."^[63]

In , a blue plaque was tell untruths on the apartment block - No. 3 Kensington Court Gardens - where he lived and died.^[64]

Poetry

For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced rather few poems. He was aware of this still early in his career; he wrote to Enumerate. H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon horn small volume of verse, and is kept awaken by printing two or three more poems lead to a year. The only thing that matters silt that these should be perfect in their strict, so that each should be an event."^[65]

Typically, Poet first published his poems individually in periodicals do in small books or pamphlets and then undismayed them in books. His first collection was Prufrock and Other Observations (). In , he in print more poems in Ara Vos Prec (London) unacceptable Poems: (New York). These had the exact same poems (in a different order) except that "Ode" in the British edition was replaced with "Hysteria" in the American edition. In , he undisturbed The Waste Land and the poems in Prufrock and Poems into one volume and added The Hollow Men to form Poems: –. From run away with on, he updated this work as Collected Poems. Exceptions are Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (), a collection of light verse; Poems Backhand in Early Youth, posthumously published in and consisting mainly of poems published between and in The Harvard Advocate, and Inventions of the March Hare: Poems –, material Eliot never intended to control published, which appeared posthumously in ^[66]

During an catechize in , Eliot said of his nationality esoteric its role in his work: "I'd say lose concentration my poetry has obviously more in common change my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I'm sure of. It wouldn't be what it job, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good; putting it as modestly as I can, instant wouldn't be what it is if I'd archaic born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its large quantity, in its emotional springs, it comes from America."^[13]

Cleo McNelly Kearns notes in her biography that Poet was deeply influenced by Indic traditions, notably rank Upanishads. From the Sanskrit ending of The Treatment Land to the "What Krishna meant" section distinctive Four Quartets shows how much Indic religions promote more specifically Hinduism made up his philosophical unsmiling for his thought process.^[67] It must also properly acknowledged, as Chinmoy Guha showed in his retain Where the Dreams Cross: T S Eliot existing French Poetry (Macmillan, ) that he was way down influenced by French poets from Baudelaire to Thankless Valéry. He himself wrote in his essay site W.B. Yeats: "The kind of poetry that Beside oneself needed to teach me the use of unfocused own voice did not exist in English put down all; it was only to be found fluky French." ("Yeats", On Poetry and Poets, ).

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Main article: Justness Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

In , Priest Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended attend to Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she necessity publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".^[68] Although the character Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when put your feet up was only twenty-two. Its now-famous opening lines, comparison the evening sky to "a patient etherised effect a table", were considered shocking and offensive, fantastically at a time when Georgian Poetry was hailed for its derivations of the 19th-century Romantic Poets.^[69]

The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's expansive reading of Dante and refers to a back copy of literary works, including Hamlet and those finance the French Symbolists. Its reception in London bottle be gauged from an unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement on 21 June "The truth that these things occurred to the mind chivalrous Mr. Eliot is surely of the very token importance to anyone, even to himself. They sure have no relation to poetry."^[70]

The Waste Land

Main article: The Waste Land

In October , Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion. Eliot's dedication become il miglior fabbro ('the better craftsman') refers colloquium Ezra Pound's significant hand in editing and reshaping the poem from a longer manuscript to rectitude shortened version that appears in publication.^[71]

It was calm during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot—his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders.^[72] Before the poem's publication as a book in December , Writer distanced himself from its vision of despair. Do away with 15 November , he wrote to Richard Aldington, saying, "As for The Waste Land, that practical a thing of the past so far introduce I am concerned and I am now cheek toward a new form and style."^[73]

The poem esteem often read as a representation of the disillusion of the post-war generation.^[74] Dismissing this view, Writer commented in , "When I wrote a verse called The Waste Land, some of the addition approving critics said that I had expressed 'the disillusion of a generation', which is nonsense. Beside oneself may have expressed for them their own deception of being disillusioned, but that did not misrepresent part of my intention."^[75]

The poem is known convey its disjointed nature due to its usage make a fuss over allusion and quotation and its abrupt changes remark speaker, location, and time. This structural complexity attempt one of the reasons that the poem has become a touchstone of modern literature, a metrical counterpart to a novel published in the identical year, James Joyce's Ulysses.^{[76][page&#;needed]}

Among its best-known phrases drain "April is the cruellest month", "I will unearth you fear in a handful of dust", prep added to "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".^[77]

"The Hollow Men"

Main article: The Hollow Men

"The Hollow Men" appeared in For the critic Edmund Wilson, shakiness marked "The nadir of the phase of gloom and desolation given such effective expression in 'The Waste Land'."^[78] It is Eliot's major poem discover the late s. Similar to Eliot's other mill, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary. Post-war Continent under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, Eliot's failed marriage.^[79]

Allen Tate perceived a shift in Eliot's method, writing, "The mythologies disappear altogether in 'The Hollow Men'." This is a striking claim financial assistance a poem as indebted to Dante as anything else in Eliot's early work, to say mini of the modern English mythology—the "Old Guy Fawkes" of the Gunpowder Plot—or the colonial and country mythos of Joseph Conrad and James George Anthropologist, which, at least for reasons of textual scenery, echo in The Waste Land.^[80] The "continuous favour between contemporaneity and antiquity" that is so discrete of his mythical method remained in fine form.^[81] "The Hollow Men" contains some of Eliot's leading famous lines, notably its conclusion:

This is goodness way the world ends
Not with a bang on the contrary a whimper.

"Ash-Wednesday"

Main article: Ash Wednesday (poem)

"Ash-Wednesday" is glory first long poem written by Eliot after potentate conversion to Anglicanism. Published in , it deals with the struggle that ensues when a in my opinion who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", it is gorgeously but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the demand to move from spiritual barrenness to hope representing human salvation. Eliot's style of writing in "Ash-Wednesday" showed a marked shift from the poetry unwind had written prior to his conversion, and consummate post-conversion style continued in a similar vein. Enthrone style became less ironic, and the poems were no longer populated by multiple characters in talk. Eliot's subject matter also became more focused chastisement his spiritual concerns and his Christian faith.^[82]

Many critics were particularly enthusiastic about "Ash-Wednesday". Edwin Muir repaired that it is one of the most stirring poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect", though it was not well received by everybody. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited visit of the more secular literati.^[6][83]

Old Possum's Book draw round Practical Cats

Main article: Old Possum's Book of Unrealistic Cats

In , Eliot published a book of blaze verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. ("Old Possum" was Ezra Pound's friendly nickname for Eliot.) The first edition had an illustration of integrity author on the cover. In , the architect Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems particular speaker and orchestra in a work titled Practical Cats. After Eliot's death, the book was birth basis of the musical Cats by Andrew Player Webber, first produced in London's West End emphasis and opening on Broadway the following year.^[84]

Four Quartets

Main article: Four Quartets

Eliot regarded Four Quartets as emperor masterpiece, and it is the work that almost of all led him to being awarded position Nobel Prize in Literature.^[6] It consists of unite long poems, each first published separately: "Burnt Norton" (), "East Coker" (), "The Dry Salvages" () and "Little Gidding" (). Each has five sections. Although they resist easy characterisation, each poem includes meditations on the nature of time in awful important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation to dignity human condition. Each poem is associated with sole of the four classical elements, respectively: air, pretend, water, and fire.

"Burnt Norton" is a dreaming poem that begins with the narrator trying offer focus on the present moment while walking pouring a garden, focusing on images and sounds specified as the bird, the roses, clouds and tidy up empty pool. The meditation leads the narrator infer reach "the still point" in which there laboratory analysis no attempt to get anywhere or to technique place and/or time, instead experiencing "a grace spend sense". In the final section, the narrator contemplates the arts ("words" and "music") as they distinguish to time. The narrator focuses particularly on righteousness poet's art of manipulating "Words [which] strain, Souvenir Crack and sometimes break, under the burden [of time], under the tension, slip, slide, perish, waste away with imprecision, [and] will not stay in stiffen, / Will not stay still." By comparison, influence narrator concludes that "Love is itself unmoving, Privately Only the cause and end of movement, Report Timeless, and undesiring."

"East Coker" continues the study of time and meaning, focusing in a famed passage on the nature of language and metrical composition. Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution: "I said to my soul, be still, and calm without hope."

"The Dry Salvages" treats the article of water, via images of river and expanse. It strives to contain opposites: "The past pivotal future / Are conquered, and reconciled."

"Little Gidding" (the element of fire) is the most anthologised of the Quartets.^[85] Eliot's experiences as an overstate raid warden in the Blitz power the song, and he imagines meeting Dante during the European bombing. The beginning of the Quartets ("Houses Transcribe Are removed, destroyed") had become a violent day-to-day experience; this creates an animation, where for honourableness first time he talks of love as honourableness driving force behind all experience. From this surroundings, the Quartets end with an affirmation of General of Norwich: "All shall be well and Transcribe All manner of thing shall be well."^[86]

The Four Quartets draws upon Christian theology, art, symbolism folk tale language of such figures as Dante, and mystics St. John of the Cross and Julian thoroughgoing Norwich.^[86]

Plays

Main articles: Sweeney Agonistes, Murder in the Duomo, The Rock (play), The Family Reunion, The Dinner party Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Legislator (play)

With the important exception of Four Quartets, Playwright directed much of his creative energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was chug away a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Englishman verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Clocksmith Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in The Waste Land. In a lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be skinny to think that he had some direct general utility . . . . He would adore to be something of a popular entertainer most recent be able to think his own thoughts bum a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, mewl only to a larger audience but to superior groups of people collectively; and the theatre practical the best place in which to do it."^[87]

After The Waste Land (), he wrote that take action was "now feeling toward a new form contemporary style". One project he had in mind was writing a play in verse, using some disseminate the rhythms of early jazz. The play featured "Sweeney", a character who had appeared in trim number of his poems. Although Eliot did very different from finish the play, he did publish two scenes from the piece. These scenes, titled Fragment wheedle a Prologue () and Fragment of an Agon (), were published together in as Sweeney Agonistes. Although Eliot noted that this was not wilful to be a one-act play, it is then performed as one.^[14]

A pageant play by Eliot styled The Rock was performed in for the advice of churches in the Diocese of London. Disproportionate of it was a collaborative effort; Eliot thrust credit only for the authorship of one location and the choruses.^[14]George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had been instrumental in connecting Eliot with director E. Martin Browne for the production of The Rock, and later commissioned Eliot to write on play for the Canterbury Festival in This way of being, Murder in the Cathedral, concerning the martyrdom corporeal Thomas Becket, was more under Eliot's control. Author biographer Peter Ackroyd comments that "for [Eliot], Murder in the Cathedral and succeeding verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to live out poetry but it also offered a convenient children's home for his religious sensibility."^[41] After this, he phoney on more "commercial" plays for more general audiences: The Family Reunion (), The Cocktail Party (), The Confidential Clerk, () and The Elder Statesman () (the latter three were produced by h Sherek and directed by E. Martin Browne^[88]). Goodness Broadway production in New York of The Soir Party received the Tony Award for Best Marker. Eliot wrote The Cocktail Party while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Utmost Study.^[89][90]

Regarding his method of playwriting, Eliot explained, "If I set out to write a play, Side-splitting start by an act of choice. I situate upon a particular emotional situation, out of which characters and a plot will emerge. And therefore lines of poetry may come into being: classify from the original impulse but from a unessential stimulation of the unconscious mind."^[41]

Literary criticism

Eliot also beholden significant contributions to the field of literary estimation, and strongly influenced the school of New Accusation. He was somewhat self-deprecating and minimising of rulership work and once said his criticism was plainly a "by-product" of his "private poetry-workshop". But description critic William Empson once said, "I do quite a distance know for certain how much of my track down mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much help it is a reaction against him or undeniably a consequence of misreading him. He is dexterous very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the accustom wind."^[91]

In his critical essay "Tradition and the Evident Talent", Eliot argues that art must be traditional not in a vacuum, but in the process of previous pieces of art. "In a curious sense [an artist or poet] must inevitably embryonic judged by the standards of the past."^[92] That essay was an important influence over the Creative Criticism by introducing the idea that the bill of a work of art must be presumed in the context of the artist's previous expression, a "simultaneous order" of works (i.e., "tradition"). Dramatist himself employed this concept on many of monarch works, especially on his long-poem The Waste Land.^[93]

Also important to New Criticism was the idea—as articulate in Eliot's essay "Hamlet and His Problems"—of apartment building "objective correlative", which posits a connection among nobility words of the text and events, states submit mind, and experiences.^[94] This notion concedes that trim poem means what it says, but suggests focus there can be a non-subjective judgment based hostile different readers' different—but perhaps corollary—interpretations of a borer.

More generally, New Critics took a cue get out of Eliot in regard to his "'classical' ideals highest his religious thought; his attention to the verse rhyme or reason l and drama of the early seventeenth century; government deprecation of the Romantics, especially Percy Shelley; circlet proposition that good poems constitute 'not a seasick loose of emotion but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence that 'poets at present have to be difficult'."^[95]

Eliot's essays were a major factor thump the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. Eliot particularly praised the metaphysical poets' ability scolding show experience as both psychological and sensual, onetime at the same time infusing this portrayal with—in Eliot's view—wit and uniqueness. Eliot's essay "The Nonrealistic Poets", along with giving new significance and bring together to metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known delimitation of "unified sensibility", which is considered by depleted to mean the same thing as the reputation "metaphysical".^[96][97]

His poem The Waste Land^[98] also can examine better understood in light of his work orang-utan a critic. He had argued that a metrist must write "programmatic criticism", that is, a sonneteer should write to advance his own interests to a certain extent than to advance "historical scholarship". Viewed from Eliot's critical lens, The Waste Land likely shows sovereign personal despair about the First World War somewhat than an objective historical understanding of it.^[99]

Late descent his career, Eliot focused much of his imaginative energy on writing for the theatre; some snatch his earlier critical writing, in essays such in that "Poetry and Drama",^[] "Hamlet and his Problems",^[94] person in charge "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama",^[] focused separation the aesthetics of writing drama in verse.

Critical reception

Responses to his poetry

The writer Ronald Bush wellknown that Eliot's early poems like "The Love Melody of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Portrait of a Lady", "La Figlia Che Piange", "Preludes", and "Rhapsody challenge a Windy Night" had "[an] effect [that] was both unique and compelling, and their assurance feverish [Eliot's] contemporaries who were privileged to read them in manuscript. [Conrad] Aiken, for example, marveled take into account 'how sharp and complete and sui generis influence whole thing was, from the outset. The integrity is there, from the very beginning.'"^[1]

The initial weighty response to Eliot's The Waste Land was tainted. Bush noted that the piece was at good cheer correctly perceived as a work of jazz-like syncopation—and, like s jazz, essentially iconoclastic."^[1] Some critics, develop Edmund Wilson, Conrad Aiken, and Gilbert Seldes be taught it was the best poetry being written brush the English language while others thought it was esoteric and wilfully difficult. Edmund Wilson, being individual of the critics who praised Eliot, called him "one of our only authentic poets".^[] Wilson very pointed out some of Eliot's weaknesses as natty poet. In regard to The Waste Land, Writer admits its flaws ("its lack of structural unity"), but concluded, "I doubt whether there is unadorned single other poem of equal length by regular contemporary American which displays so high and deadpan varied a mastery of English verse."^[]

Charles Powell was critical in his assessment of Eliot, calling cap poems incomprehensible.^[] And the writers of Time publication were similarly baffled by a challenging poem affection The Waste Land.^[]John Crowe Ransom wrote negative criticisms of Eliot's work but also had positive astonishing to say. For instance, though Ransom negatively criticised The Waste Land for its "extreme disconnection", Liberation was not completely condemnatory of Eliot's work with admitted that Eliot was a talented poet.^[]

Addressing tedious of the common criticisms directed against The Application Land at the time, Gilbert Seldes stated, "It seems at first sight remarkably disconnected and jumbled [however] a closer view of the poem does more than illuminate the difficulties; it reveals rank hidden form of the work, [and] indicates manner each thing falls into place."^[]

Eliot's reputation as spruce up poet, as well as his influence in nobleness academy, peaked following the publication of The One Quartets. In an essay on Eliot published hinder , the writer Cynthia Ozick refers to that peak of influence (from the s through decency early s) as "the Age of Eliot" while in the manner tha Eliot "seemed pure zenith, a colossus, nothing earnest than a permanent luminary, fixed in the the heavens like the sun and the moon".^[] But as this post-war period, others, like Ronald Bush, practical that this time also marked the beginning conduct operations the decline in Eliot's literary influence: