T.S. Eliot
Eliot was almost as renowned a literary critic as he was a poet. From 1916 through 1921 he contributed approximately one hundred reviews and articles to various periodicals. This early criticism was produced at night under the pressure of supplementing his meager salary—first as a teacher, then as a bank clerk—and not, as is sometimes suggested, under the compulsion to rewrite literary history. A product of his critical intelligence and superb training in philosophy and literature, his essays, however hastily written and for whatever motive, had an immediate impact. His ideas quickly solidified into doctrine and became, with the early essays of I.A. Richards, the basis of the New Criticism, one of the most influential schools of literary study in the 20th century. Through half a century of critical writing, Eliot’s concerns remained more or less constant; his position regarding those concerns, however, was frequently refined, revised, or, occasionally, reversed. Beginning in the late 1920s, Eliot’s literary criticism was supplemented by religious and social criticism. In these writings, such as The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), he can be seen as a deeply involved and thoughtful Christian poet in the process of making sense of the world between the two World Wars. These writings, sympathetically read, suggest the dilemma of the serious observer of Western culture in the 1930s, and rightly understood, they complement his poetry, plays, and literary journalism.
Eliot is also an important figure in 20th-century drama. He was inclined from the first toward the theater-his early poems are essentially dramatic, and many of his early essays and reviews are on drama or dramatists. By the mid 1920s he was writing a play, Sweeney Agonistes (published in 1932, performed in 1933); in the 1930s he wrote an ecclesiastical pageant, The Rock (performed and published in 1934), and two full-blown plays, Murder in the Cathedral (performed and published in 1935) and The Family Reunion (performed and published in 1939); and in the late 1940s and the 1950s he devoted himself almost exclusively to plays, of which The Cocktail Party (performed in 1949, published in 1950) has been the most popular. His goal, realized only in part, was the revitalization of poetic drama in terms that would be consistent with the modern age. He experimented with language that, though close to contemporary speech, is essentially poetic and thus capable of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual resonance. His work has influenced several important 20th-century playwrights, including W.H. Auden and Harold Pinter. Eliot also made significant contributions as an editor and publisher. From 1922 to 1939 he was the editor of a major intellectual journal, The Criterion, and from 1925 to 1965 he was an editor/director in the publishing house of Faber and Faber. In both capacities he worked behind the scenes to nurture the intellectual and spiritual life of his times.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri; he was the second son and seventh child of Charlotte Champe Stearns and Henry Ware Eliot, members of a distinguished Massachusetts family recently transplanted to Missouri. Eliot’s family tree includes settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, prominent clergymen and educators, a president of Harvard University (Charles William Eliot), and three presidents of the United States (John Adams, John Quincy Adams, and Rutherford B. Hayes). In 1834 the poet’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, moved to St. Louis to establish a Unitarian mission. He quickly became a leader in civic development, founding the first Unitarian Church, Washington University (which he served as president), Smith Academy, and Mary Institute.
The Eliot family lived in downtown St. Louis, not far from the Mississippi River, and the poet spent his formative years in a large house (no longer standing) at 2635 Locust Street. His family summered in New England, and in 1897 Henry Ware Eliot built a house near the sea at Gloucester, Massachusetts. The summers in this spacious house on Cape Ann provided the poet with his happiest memories, which he tapped through the years for poems such as “Marina” (1930) and The Dry Salvages.
From these few facts, several points emerge as relevant to Eliot’s mind and art. First, feeling that “the U.S.A. up to a hundred years ago was a family extension” (as he wrote in a 1928 letter to Herbert Read), Eliot became acutely conscious of history—his own, that of his family, his country, his civilization, his race—and of the ways in which the past constantly impinges on the present and the present on the future. Second, despite the fact that Eliot was blessed with a happy childhood in a loving family, he was early possessed by a sense of homelessness. In 1928, just after he had changed his religion from Unitarian to Anglican and his citizenship from American to British, he summed up the result of these formative years in Missouri and Massachusetts, describing himself in a letter to Read as “an American who ... was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn’t a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state ... and who so was never anything anywhere.” As he had written to his brother, Henry, in 1919, a few years after settling in London, “one remains always a foreigner.” Third, Eliot had an urban imagination, the shape and content of which came from his childhood experience in St. Louis. In a 1930 letter quoted in an appendix to American Literature and the American Language (1953), he said that “St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has done.” Several of his signature images—city streets and city slums, city rivers and city skies—were etched on his mind in St. Louis. City scenes, even sordid ones, as he suggested in a 1914 letter to Conrad Aiken, helped him to feel alive, alert, and self-conscious.
Eliot was educated at Smith Academy in St. Louis (1898-1905), Milton Academy in Massachusetts (1905-1906), Harvard University (B.A., June 1909; M.A., February 1911; Ph.D. courses, October 1911-May 1914), University of Paris-Sorbonne (October 1910-June 1911), and Merton College, Oxford University (October 1914-May 1915). He devoted a further year (1915-1916) to a doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley, eventually published in 1964.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Eliot emphasized language and literature—Latin, Greek, German, and French. Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of his undergraduate career was his accidental discovery in December 1908 of Arthur Symons’s Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), a book that he claimed had changed the course of his life. First, Symons introduced him to the poetry of Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire. From Laforgue, Eliot learned how to handle emotion in poetry, through irony and a quality of detachment that enabled him to see himself and his own emotions essentially as objects for analysis. From Baudelaire, he learned how to use the sordid images of the modern city, the material “at hand,” in poetry, and of even greater consequence, he learned something of the nature of good and evil in modern life. Second, Symons stimulated Eliot to take a course in French literary criticism from Irving Babbitt in 1910. Babbitt nurtured Eliot’s budding Francophilia, his dislike of Romanticism, and his appreciation of tradition. These tastes are evident in most of Eliot’s early literary criticism.
During the year he spent at the Sorbonne in Paris, Eliot came to know the work of the Roman Catholic philosopher Charles Maurras through the Kouvelle Revue Francaise and, perhaps of greater significance, attended the lectures of Henri Bergson, in the process deepening the reflections on time and consciousness that are explored in the early poetry and receive their most explicit treatment in Four Quartets. Paris was also important in the development of Eliot’s urban imagination. He took advantage of the popular arts, of opera and ballet, and of museums, but most of all he absorbed the images of urban life seen on the back streets along the river Seine. Near the end of his year in Paris, Eliot visited London for the first time, and before returning home, he also visited northern Italy and Munich.
During his time at Harvard, he studied with some of the most distinguished philosophers of the century, including George Santayana, Josiah Royce, and Bertrand Russell. He focused on Indie religion and idealist philosophy (especially Immanuel Kant), with further work in ethics and psychology. The Indie studies (two years of Sanskrit and Indian philosophy) abetted his innate asceticism and provided a more comprehensive context for his understanding of culture. Inevitably, these Eastern materials entered his poetry. The Indian myth of the thunder god, for example, provides the context for section 5 (“What the Thunder Said”) of The Waste Land, and Buddha’s fire sermon the context for section 3 (“The Fire Sermon”). Eliot’s most fruitful extracurricular activity at Harvard was his association with the college literary magazine, the Harvard Advocate. Several of his earliest poems were published first in this periodical, and at least one of his lifelong friendships, that with fellow poet Aiken, was formed in this nursery of writers and poets.
One of the special pleasures of Eliot’s years in Boston was the close relationship that developed with his cousin Eleanor Hinkley, three years his junior. As a student at Radcliffe College, she had taken George Pierce Baker’s famous “47 Workshop” in theater. In 1912, through amateur theatricals at her house, Eliot met Emily Hale, with whom he fell in love and at one time intended to marry. Eliot’s letters to Hinkley are among his most high-spirited, preserving intact his youthful wit and urbanity. His letters to Hale will probably be among his most revealing, but until the year 2020, they remain under seal at Princeton University. Evidently, he never ceased loving her, and in the late 1920s he resumed contact. Their relationship, which seems to have been decorous in all senses of the word, continued for two decades or more, ending before his second marriage in 1957.
Arriving at Oxford in October 1914, Eliot found that most of the British students had left for the Western Front. He had hoped to meet Bradley, a member of Merton, but the old don was by this time a recluse, and they never met. At the end of the academic year, he moved to London and continued working on his dissertation, which he finished a year later. Eliot’s immersion in contemporary philosophy, particularly in Bradley’s idealism, had many effects, of which two proved especially important. Positively, these materials suggested methods of structure that he was able to put to immediate use in his postwar poems. Negatively, his work in philosophy convinced him that the most sophisticated answers to the cultural and spiritual crisis of his time were inadequate. This conclusion contributed to his decision to abandon the professorial career for which his excellent education had prepared him and instead to continue literary pursuits.
Eliot’s career as a poet can be divided into three periods—the first coinciding with his studies in Boston and Paris and culminating in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1911; the second coinciding with World War I and with the financial and marital stress of his early years in London, and culminating in The Waste Land in 1922; and the third coinciding with his angst at the economic depression and the rise of Nazism and culminating in the wartime Four Quartets in 1943. The poems of the first period were preceded only by a few exercises, published in school magazines, but in 1910 and 1911 he wrote four poems: “Portrait of a Lady,” “Preludes,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”—that introduce themes to which, with variation and development, Eliot returned time and again. One of the most significant is the problem of isolation, with attention to its causes and consequences in the contemporary world. In “Portrait of a Lady” a man and woman meet, but the man is inarticulate, imprisoned in thought. In this ironic dramatization of a “conversation galante,” the woman speaks without thinking and the man thinks without speaking (a structure to be repeated in “A Game of Chess” in The Waste Land).
The profound isolation of the characters in “Portrait of a Lady” becomes in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” an isolation that is absolute. The specific lady is succeeded by generalized women; the supercilious youth by the middle-aged intellectual he will become, for whom women and indeed the entire universe exist as abstractions. The poignance of this poem derives in part from a tension between Prufrock’s self-generated isolation and his obsession with language. Although he is afraid to speak, he can think only in the language of dialogue. This dialogue with himself, moreover, consistently turns on the infinite possibilities (or impossibilities) of dialogue with others. In “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” the female Other, similarly isolated and isolating, is a young prostitute in a stained dress hesitating in a doorway, desired and despised at once, overshadowed by an old prostitute, the pockmarked moon, smiling feebly on the midnight walker.
In these early poems, the progression from a feeble attempt to communicate in “Portrait of a Lady” to a total failure in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is paralleled on other levels. The isolation is sexual, social, religious, and (because Eliot is a poet) vocational. In “Portrait of a Lady,” other people and perhaps God exist, but they are unreachable; in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” they exist only as aspects of the thinker’s mind; in “Preludes,” the Other, whether human or divine, has been so thoroughly assimilated that he/she can no longer be defined. This situation is explicitly aesthetic. The drawing-room protagonist of “Portrait of a Lady” is paralleled by an artist in the concert room, and both the suitor and the pianist fail to reach their listeners. In both cases, the failure is described in ceremonial terms that superimpose the religious on the sexual and aesthetic. J. Alfred Prufrock—as lover, prophet, poet—also fails to reach his audience. These failures are skillfully layered by the use of imagery that defines Prufrock’s problem as sexual (how to relate to women), religious (how to raise himself from the dead, how to cope with his own flesh on a platter), and rhetorical (how to sing, how to say, how to revise). And as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” shows most clearly, the horizontal and vertical gaps mirror a gap within, a gap between thought and feeling, a partition of the self.
Between the poems of 1910-1911 and The Waste Land, Eliot lived through several experiences that are crucial in understanding his development as a poet. His decision to put down roots, or to discover roots, in Europe stands, together with his first marriage and his conversion, as the most important of his entire life. Eliot had been preceded in London by his Harvard friend Aiken, who had met Ezra Pound and showed him a copy of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Eliot called on Pound on September 22, 1914, and Pound immediately adopted him as a cause, promoting his poetry and introducing him to William Butler Yeats and other artists. In 1915, at a time when Eliot was close to giving up on poetry, Pound arranged for the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry magazine, and in 1917 he facilitated the publication of Prufrock and Other Observations. Pound continued to play a central role in Eliot’s life and work through the early 1920s. He influenced the form and content of Eliot’s next group of poems, the quatrains in Poems (1919), and more famously, he changed the shape of The Waste Land by urging Eliot to cut several long passages.
The impact of Pound, however, pales beside that of Vivienne (or Vivien) Haigh-Wood, the pretty English governess Eliot married in 1915. In an April 24 letter to Hinkley describing his social life at Oxford, Eliot mentioned that he had met an English girl named Vivien. Pound, as part of his strategy for keeping Eliot in England, encouraged him to marry her, and on June 26, without notifying his parents, he did so at the Hampstead Registry Office. However lovingly begun, the marriage was in most respects a disaster. In the 1960s, in a private paper, Eliot admitted that it was doomed from the start: “I think that all I wanted of Vivienne was a flirtation or a mild affair: I was too shy and unpractised to achieve either ... I came to persuade myself that I was in love with her simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England.” The odd nature of this misalliance was immediately evident to Eliot’s friends, including Russell, Mary Hutchinson, and Virginia Woolf. Vivienne Eliot, who had suffered from “nerves” for years, became irrecoverably ill after the marriage, and Eliot, himself in fragile health, felt partially responsible for her deterioration. This burden is the biographical shadow behind a motif recurrent in the poems and plays—the motif of “doing a girl in.” The struggle to cope emotionally and financially with his wife’s escalating illness exhausted Eliot and led, in 1921, to his collapse. His failed attempt between 1915 and 1922 to build a bridge across the gulf that separated them, reflected most conspicuously in part 2 of The Waste Land, is a lived experience behind all of his subsequent work.
Eliot had arrived in England the month that World War I began. Like his European friends, he was deeply disturbed by unfolding events and desperately worried about acquaintances on the battlefield. In May 1915 his close friend Jean Verdenal was killed. On May 31, the first German bomb hit London, killing 28 people and wounding 60. Within a week or two of this watershed event, Eliot moved to the City (the financial district), where he remained throughout the war. In 1916 he wrote to his brother that “The present year has been ... the most awful nightmare of anxiety that the mind of man could conceive.” Eliot, who loved both France and England, tried to enlist, but his application was complicated by his failure to pass the medical exam. By the time the war ended in November 1918, an influenza epidemic was sweeping over the world, claiming nearly three times as many lives as had been lost in the war. By then both Eliots were gravely ill, and it took them years to recover completely.
The events of these years were formative in Eliot’s life and art. First, the precipitous marriage complicated his attitude toward sexuality and human love. Some of the poems written during and immediately after the war (“Sweeney Erect,” for example, and The Waste Land) connect sexuality with violence in troubling ways. Second, the marriage, the war, and the change of vocation generated estrangement from America in general and from his family in particular. His family disapproved of the marriage and the decision to drop philosophy as a career, and because the family lived in America, far from the bloodshed, they had a superficial idea of the suffering in Europe. Eliot continued to brood over the fact that his dying father believed that his son had made a mess of his life. Third, the events of these years led to severe financial distress. To support himself and his chronically ill wife, Eliot took a job as a teacher—in the fall of 1915 at High Wycombe Grammar School, and throughout 1916 at Highgate Junior School. Finding the teaching of young boys draining work, he gave it up at the end of 1916, and in March 1917 he began work in the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyds Bank. Although he stayed with Lloyds for the next nine years, he discovered that banking, like teaching, did not produce nearly enough income to cover his expenses and Vivienne Eliot’s medical bills. He was thus forced to supplement his duties as teacher, banker, and nurse to his wife with night work as lecturer, reviewer, and essayist. Working from 1916 to 1920 under great pressure (a 15-hour workday was common for him), he wrote essays, published in 1920 as The Sacred Wood, that reshaped literary history.
Eliot’s early essays can be seen as a discursive variation on the subjects underlying the early poems; his awareness, for example, of the problem of isolation, its causes and its consequences, is evident in the essays. In the poems, the emphasis is on isolation of individuals and classes from one another and on the human isolation from God. In the literary criticism, the emphasis is on the artist in isolation, cut off from his audience and from great artists and thinkers of both the present and the past. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot attempts to cope with the isolation of the artist resulting from the early 20th century’s massive repudiation of the past, a repudiation that severed man’s intellectual and spiritual roots. Eliot deals with the implications of this disaster by defining “tradition” as an ideal structure in which the “whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his [the artist’s] own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.” To put it more simply, he defines tradition not as a canon but as an ongoing and fluid relationship of writers, living and dead, within the mind and bones of the contemporary poet. Eliot’s reaction against Romanticism, similarly, is related to the fact that Romanticism celebrates the artist in isolation. Eliot’s notion that modern poetry should be complex derives in part from his attempt to overcome his isolation from his readers by forcing them to become involved as collaborators in his poetry. He suggests that a text is a self-sufficient object and at the same time a construct collaboratively achieved by a reader. His account of the way a poet’s mind works by unifying disparate phenomena is consistent with his dialectical imagination, as is his account of literary history.
April 21 2021
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