American-born British poet (1888–1965)
For other people named Thomas Dramatist, see Thomas Eliot (disambiguation).
Thomas Stearns EliotOM (26 September 1888 – 4 Jan 1965) was a poet, essayist and playwright.[1] He was a leading figure in English-language Modernist poetry where he reinvigorated say publicly art through his use of language, writing style, and cosmos structure. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.[2]
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, purify a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England beget 1914 at the age of 25 and went on allot settle, work, and marry there.[3] He became a British problem in 1927 at the age of 39 and renounced his American citizenship.[4]
Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" from 1914 to 1915, which, at the time of its publication, was considered outlandish.[5] It was followed by The Waste Land (1922), "The Pointless Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" (1930), and Four Quartets (1943).[6] Inaccuracy wrote seven plays, notably Murder in the Cathedral (1935) presentday The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the 1948 Philanthropist Prize in Literature, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".[7][8]
The Eliots were a Boston elite kinsmen, with roots in England and New England. Eliot's paternal granddaddy, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri,[6][9] embark on establish a Unitarian Christian church there. His father, Henry Conscious Eliot, was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of rendering Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, who wrote poetry, was a social worker, which was a new profession in the U.S. in the early Twentieth century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children. Leak out to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns.
Eliot's childhood infatuation seam literature can be ascribed to several factors. First, he difficult to understand to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in innumerable physical activities and thus was prevented from socialising with his peers. As he was often isolated, his love for letters developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy gaining became obsessed with books, favouring tales of savage life, description Wild West, or Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.[10] In his report about Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the verdant Eliot "would often curl up in the window-seat behind mainly enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the concern of living."[11] Secondly, Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected make equal more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's boyhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those go out who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have antiquated born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, mean London."[12]
From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, the boys college preparatory division of Washington University, where his studies objective Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. He began to inscribe poetry when he was 14 under the influence of Prince Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He thought the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them.[13] His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was impossible to get into as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905.[14] Also published there in Apr 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an ignoble lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" in The University Advocate, Harvard University's student literary magazine.[15] He published three small stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". The last mentioned story reflected his exploration of the Igorot Village while temporary the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis.[16][17][18] His interest injure indigenous peoples thus predated his anthropological studies at Harvard.[19]
Eliot fleeting in St. Louis, Missouri, for the first 16 years help his life at the house on Locust Street where blooper was born. After going away to school in 1905, operate returned to St. Louis only for vacations and visits. Teeth of moving away from the city, Eliot wrote to a newspaper columnist that "Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper discern on me than any other part of the world."[20]
Following gradation from Smith Academy, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts hold a preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer who late published The Waste Land. He studied at Harvard College differ 1906 to 1909, earning a Bachelor of Arts in require elective program similar to comparative literature in 1909 and a Master of Arts in English literature the following year.[1][6] As of his year at Milton Academy, Eliot was allowed equal earn his Bachelor of Arts after three years instead always the usual four.[21]Frank Kermode writes that the most important minute of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908 when he revealed Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature. This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without Poet, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book Les amours jaunes, a work that stilted the course of Eliot's life.[22]The Harvard Advocate published some returns his poems and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Writer, the American writer and critic.[23]
After working as a philosophy aid at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Town where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at depiction Sorbonne. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read metrical composition with Henri Alban-Fournier.[6][22] From 1911 to 1914, he was stop at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit.[6][24] While a adherent of the Harvard Graduate School, Eliot met and fell encompass love with Emily Hale.[25] Eliot was awarded a scholarship lookout Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. He first visited Marburg, Deutschland, where he planned to take a summer programme, but when the First World War broke out he went to Town instead. At the time so many American students attended Writer that the Junior Common Room proposed a motion "that that society abhors the Americanization of Oxford". It was defeated offspring two votes after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture.[26]
Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, multitudinous books and hideous pictures on the walls [...] Oxford crack very pretty, but I don't like to be dead."[26] Escaping Oxford, Eliot spent much of his time in London. That city had a monumental and life-altering effect on Eliot funding several reasons, the most significant of which was his promotion to the influential American literary figure Ezra Pound. A joining through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on 22 September 1914, Eliot paid a visit to Pound's flat. Knock instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching" and was crucial to Eliot's fledgling career as a poet, as he is credited run off with promoting Eliot through social events and literary gatherings. Thus, according to biographer John Worthen, during his time in England Poet "was seeing as little of Oxford as possible". He was instead spending long periods of time in London, in depiction company of Ezra Pound and "some of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared [...] It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere."[27] In the predict, Eliot did not settle at Merton and left after a year. In 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck College, Institution of higher education of London.[28]
In 1916, he completed a doctoral dissertation for Philanthropist on "Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley", but failed to return for the viva voce examination.[6][29]
Before leaving the US, Eliot had told Emily Hale that dirt was in love with her. He exchanged letters with any more from Oxford during 1914 and 1915, but they did put together meet again until 1927.[25][30] In a letter to Aiken compute in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote: "I am exceedingly dependent upon women (I mean female society)."[31] Less than quadruplet months later, Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a University governess. They were married at Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915.[32]
After a short visit, alone, to his family hurt the United States, Eliot returned to London and took not too teaching jobs, such as lecturing at Birkbeck College, University admire London. The philosopher Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars own suggested that she and Russell had an affair, but representation allegations were never confirmed.[33]
The marriage seems to have been markedly unhappy, in part because of Vivienne's health problems. In a letter addressed to Ezra Pound, she covers an extensive directory of her symptoms, which included a habitually high temperature, lethargy, insomnia, migraines, and colitis.[34] This, coupled with apparent mental disequilibrium, meant that she was often sent away by Eliot increase in intensity her doctors for extended periods of time in the dribble of improving her health. As time went on, he became increasingly detached from her. According to witnesses, both Eliots were frequent complainers of illness, physical and mental, while Eliot would drink excessively and Vivienne is said to have developed a liking for opium and ether, drugs prescribed for medical issues. It is claimed that the couple's wearying behaviour caused thickskinned visitors to vow never to spend another evening in description company of both together.[35] The couple formally separated in 1933, and in 1938 Vivienne's brother, Maurice, had her committed draw near a mental hospital, against her will, where she remained until her death of heart disease in 1947. When told facet a phone call from the asylum that Vivienne had convulsion unexpectedly during the night, Eliot is said to have interred his face in his hands and cried out 'Oh Deity, oh God.'[35]
Their relationship became the subject of a 1984 ground Tom & Viv, which in 1994 was adapted as a film of the same name.
In a private paper hard going in his sixties, Eliot confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the endurance of [Ezra] Pound) that she would save the poet insensitive to keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind look out on of which came The Waste Land."[36]
After turn your back on something Merton, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably at Highgate School in London, where he taught French and Latin: his students included John Betjeman.[6] He subsequently taught at the Imperial Grammar School, High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. To earn extra impecunious, he wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses at University College London and Oxford. In 1917, he took a position at Lloyds Bank in London, working on alien accounts. On a trip to Paris in August 1920 cop the artist Wyndham Lewis, he met the writer James Author. Eliot said he found Joyce arrogant, and Joyce doubted Eliot's ability as a poet at the time, but the flash writers soon became friends, with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever put your feet up was in Paris.[37] Eliot and Wyndham Lewis also maintained a close friendship, leading to Lewis's later making his well-known rendering painting of Eliot in 1938.
Charles Whibley recommended T. S. Eliot to Geoffrey Faber.[38] In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds amount become a director in the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer (later Faber & Faber), where he remained for the a little something of his career.[39][40] At Faber & Faber, he was reliable for publishing distinguished English poets, including W. H. Auden, Writer Spender, Charles Madge and Ted Hughes.[41]
On 29 June 1927, Eliot converted from Unitarianism to Protestantism, and in November that year he took British citizenship, thereby renouncing his United States citizenship in the event he locked away not officially done so previously.[42] He became a churchwarden sustenance his parish church, St Stephen's, Gloucester Road, London, and a life member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr.[43][44] He specifically identified as Anglo-Catholic, proclaiming himself "classicist in letters, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion".[45][46]
About 30 existence later Eliot commented on his religious views that he mass "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament".[47] He also had wider spiritual interests, commenting consider it "I see the path of progress for modern man display his occupation with his own self, with his inner being" and citing Goethe and Rudolf Steiner as exemplars of specified a direction.[48]
One of Eliot's biographers, Peter Ackroyd, commented that "the purposes of [Eliot's conversion] were two-fold. One: the Church party England offered Eliot some hope for himself, and I ponder Eliot needed some resting place. But secondly, it attached Poet to the English community and English culture."[41]
By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife promotion some time. When Harvard offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932–1933 academic year, he accepted and residue Vivienne in England. Upon his return, he arranged for a formal separation from her, avoiding all but one meeting be a sign of her between his leaving for America in 1932 and wise death in 1947. Vivienne was committed to the Northumberland Deal with mental hospital in Woodberry Down, Manor House, London, in 1938, and remained there until she died. Although Eliot was importunate legally her husband, he never visited her.[49] From 1933 run into 1946 Eliot had a close emotional relationship with Emily Crawl. Eliot later destroyed Hale's letters to him, but Hale donated Eliot's to Princeton University Library where they were sealed, pursuing Eliot's and Hale's wishes, for 50 years after both challenging died, until 2020.[50] When Eliot heard of the donation stylishness deposited his own account of their relationship with Harvard Campus to be opened whenever the Princeton letters were.[25]
From 1938 communication 1957 Eliot's public companion was Mary Trevelyan of London Lincoln, who wanted to marry him and left a detailed memoir.[51][52][53]
From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat at 19 Historian Mansions, Chelsea, with his friend John Davy Hayward, who controlled and managed Eliot's papers, styling himself "Keeper of the Author Archive".[54][55] Hayward also collected Eliot's pre-Prufrock verse, commercially published care Eliot's death as Poems Written in Early Youth. When Playwright and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge, in 1965.
On 10 January 1957, at the see of 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher vigorous, as she had been his secretary at Faber & Faber since August 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ritual was held in St Barnabas Church, Kensington, London,[56] at 6:15 am with virtually no one in attendance other than his wife's parents. In the early 1960s, by then in failing form, Eliot worked as an editor for the Wesleyan University Stifle, seeking new poets in Europe for publication. After Eliot's passing, Valerie dedicated her time to preserving his legacy, by redaction and annotating The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land.[57] Valerie Poet died on 9 November 2012 at her home in London.[58]
Eliot had no children with either of his wives.
Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington auspicious London, on 4 January 1965,[59] and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.[60] In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken to St Michael and All Angels' Church, East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors challenging 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 my end is cloudy beginning."[62]
In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, Author was commemorated by the placement of a large stone put in the bank the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey. Depiction stone, cut by designer Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates, his Order of Merit, and a quotation yield his poem Little Gidding, "the communication / of the gone is tongued with fire beyond / the language of representation living."[63]
In 1986, a blue plaque was placed on the room block - No. 3 Kensington Court Gardens - where misstep lived and died.[64]
For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced relatively few poems. He was aware of this even dependable in his career; he wrote to J. H. Woods, ambush of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London disintegration built upon one small volume of verse, and is reserved up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should suit an event."[65]
Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small books or pamphlets and then collected them in books. His first collection was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). In 1920, he published more poems in Ara Vos Prec (London) and Poems: 1920 (New York). These had say publicly same poems (in a different order) except that "Ode" meet the British edition was replaced with "Hysteria" in the Inhabitant edition. In 1925, he collected The Waste Land and rendering poems in Prufrock and Poems into one volume and additional The Hollow Men to form Poems: 1909–1925. From then tragedy, he updated this work as Collected Poems. Exceptions are Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection of stem verse; Poems Written in Early Youth, posthumously published in 1967 and consisting mainly of poems published between 1907 and 1910 in The Harvard Advocate, and Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, material Eliot never intended to have published, which appeared posthumously in 1996.[66]
During an interview in 1959, Eliot aforesaid of his nationality and its role in his work: "I'd say that my poetry has obviously more in common get better my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written attach my generation in England. That I'm sure of. ... Get a breath of air wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good; putting it as modestly as I gaze at, it wouldn't be what it is if I'd been calved in England, and it wouldn't be what it is theorize I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes evade America."[13]
Cleo McNelly Kearns notes in her biography that Eliot was deeply influenced by Indic traditions, notably the Upanishads. From say publicly Sanskrit ending of The Waste Land to the "What Avatar meant" section of Four Quartets shows how much Indic religions and more specifically Hinduism made up his philosophical basic fail to appreciate his thought process.[67] It must also be acknowledged, as Chinmoy Guha showed in his book Where the Dreams Cross: T S Eliot and French Poetry (Macmillan, 2011) that he was deeply influenced by French poets from Baudelaire to Paul Valéry. He himself wrote in his 1940 essay on W.B. Yeats: "The kind of poetry that I needed to teach initial the use of my own voice did not exist speck English at all; it was only to be found behave French." ("Yeats", On Poetry and Poets, 1948).
Main article: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry journal, recommended to Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she should publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".[68] Although representation character Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most rule the poem when he was only twenty-two. Its now-famous opportunity lines, comparing the evening sky to "a patient etherised effect a table", were considered shocking and offensive, especially at a time when Georgian Poetry was hailed for its derivations pick up the check the 19th-century Romantic Poets.[69]
The poem's structure was heavily influenced by way of Eliot's extensive reading of Dante and refers to a integer of literary works, including Hamlet and those of the Nation Symbolists. Its reception in London can be gauged from ending unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement on 21 June 1917. "The fact that these things occurred to the recall of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest value to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relationship to poetry."[70]
Main article: The Waste Land
In October 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion. Eliot's commitment to il miglior fabbro ('the better craftsman') refers to Scribe Pound's significant hand in editing and reshaping the poem use up a longer manuscript to the shortened version that appears discern publication.[71]
It was composed during a period of personal difficulty look after 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 1922, Eliot distanced himself from its measurement of despair. On 15 November 1922, he wrote to Richard Aldington, saying, "As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am bother and I am now feeling toward a new form meticulous style."[73]
The poem is often read as a representation of depiction disillusionment of the post-war generation.[74] Dismissing this view, Eliot commented in 1931, "When I wrote a poem called The Dissipate Land, some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed 'the disillusion of a generation', which is gobbledygook. I may have expressed for them their own illusion magnetize being disillusioned, but that did not form part of cheap intention."[75]
The poem is known for its disjointed nature due end up its usage of allusion and quotation and its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. This structural complexity is only of the reasons that the poem has become a benchmark of modern literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel publicized in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses.[76][page needed]
Among its best-known phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show spiky fear in a handful of dust", and "These fragments I have shored against my ruins".[77]
Main article: The Carrying no great weight Men
"The Hollow Men" appeared in 1925. For the critic Edmund Wilson, it marked "The nadir of the phase of depression and desolation given such effective expression in 'The Waste Land'."[78] It is Eliot's major poem of the late 1920s. Be like to Eliot's other works, its themes are overlapping and incoherent. Post-war Europe 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 distinguished claim for a poem as indebted to Dante as anything else in Eliot's early work, to say little of representation modern English mythology—the "Old Guy Fawkes" of the Gunpowder Plot—or the colonial and agrarian mythos of Joseph Conrad and Felon George Frazer, which, at least for reasons of textual record, echo in The Waste Land.[80] The "continuous parallel between contemporaneousness and antiquity" that is so characteristic of his mythical practice remained in fine form.[81] "The Hollow Men" contains some produce Eliot's most famous lines, notably its conclusion:
This is description way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Main article: Ash Wednesday (poem)
"Ash-Wednesday" is the first long poem hard going by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published welcome 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when a person who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred run into as Eliot's "conversion poem", it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual fruitlessness to hope for human salvation. Eliot's style of writing heavens "Ash-Wednesday" showed a marked shift from the poetry he difficult written prior to his 1927 conversion, and his post-conversion kind continued in a similar vein. His style became less humourous, and the poems were no longer populated by multiple characters in dialogue. Eliot's subject matter also became more focused exhilaration his spiritual concerns and his Christian faith.[82]
Many critics were addition enthusiastic about "Ash-Wednesday". Edwin Muir maintained that it is susceptible of the most moving poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps say publicly "most perfect", though it was not well received by everybody. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of representation more secular literati.[6][83]
Main article: Accommodate Possum's Book of Practical Cats
In 1939, Eliot published a tome of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. ("Old Possum" was Ezra Pound's friendly nickname for Eliot.) The pull it off edition had an illustration of the author on the excel. In 1954, the composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of interpretation poems for speaker and orchestra in a work titled Practical Cats. After Eliot's death, the book was the basis confiscate the musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber, first produced locked in London's West End in 1981 and opening on Broadway depiction following year.[84]
Main article: Four Quartets
Eliot regarded Four Quartets likewise his masterpiece, and it is the work that most farm animals all led him to being awarded the Nobel Prize solution Literature.[6] It consists of four long poems, each first obtainable separately: "Burnt Norton" (1936), "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941) and "Little Gidding" (1942). Each has five sections. Though they resist easy characterisation, each poem includes meditations on say publicly nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and take the edge off relation to the human condition. Each poem is associated adapt one of the four classical elements, respectively: air, earth, o and fire.
"Burnt Norton" is a meditative poem that begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present second while walking through a garden, focusing on images and sounds such as the bird, the roses, clouds and an unfilled pool. The meditation leads the narrator to reach "the do point" in which there is no attempt to get anyplace or to experience place and/or time, instead experiencing "a stomachturning of sense". In the final section, the narrator contemplates rendering arts ("words" and "music") as they relate to time. Description narrator focuses particularly on the poet's art of manipulating "Words [which] strain, / Crack and sometimes break, under the strain [of time], under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay upset imprecision, [and] will not stay in place, / Will troupe stay still." By comparison, the narrator concludes that "Love decay itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of add to, / Timeless, and undesiring."
"East Coker" continues the examination replicate time and meaning, focusing in a famous passage on picture nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution: "I said to my soul, be still, become peaceful wait without hope."
"The Dry Salvages" treats the element appropriate water, via images of river and sea. It strives finished contain opposites: "The past and future / Are conquered, settle down reconciled."
"Little Gidding" (the element of fire) is the ultimate anthologised of the Quartets.[85] Eliot's experiences as an air mugging warden in the Blitz power the poem, and he imagines meeting Dante during the German bombing. The beginning of depiction Quartets ("Houses / Are removed, destroyed") had become a brutal everyday experience; this creates an animation, where for the prime time he talks of love as the driving force give up all experience. From this background, the Quartets end with modification affirmation of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well sports ground / All manner of thing shall be well."[86]
The Four Quartets draws upon Christian theology, art, symbolism and language of much figures as Dante, and mystics St. John of the Stare and Julian of Norwich.[86]
Main articles: Sweeney Agonistes, Murder in representation Cathedral, The Rock (play), The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Celebration, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman (play)
With the indicate exception of Four Quartets, Eliot directed much of his deceitful energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays in verse, habitually comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; onlooker his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Poet Kyd in The Waste Land. In a 1933 lecture fiasco said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be faithful to think that he had some direct social utility . . . . He would like to be something admire a popular entertainer and be able to think his chill out thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only fulfil a larger audience but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which bung do it."[87]
After The Waste Land (1922), he wrote that recognized was "now feeling toward a new form and style". Reschedule project he had in mind was writing a play be sold for verse, using some of the rhythms of early jazz. Description play featured "Sweeney", a character who had appeared in a number of his poems. Although Eliot did not finish say publicly play, he did publish two scenes from the piece. These scenes, titled Fragment of a Prologue (1926) and Fragment give a miss an Agon (1927), were published together in 1932 as Sweeney Agonistes. Although Eliot noted that this was not intended close be a one-act play, it is sometimes performed as one.[14]
A pageant play by Eliot called The Rock was performed feature 1934 for the benefit of churches in the Diocese push London. Much of it was a collaborative effort; Eliot recognized credit only for the authorship of one scene and say publicly choruses.[14]George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had been instrumental fragment connecting Eliot with producer E. Martin Browne for the work hard of The Rock, and later commissioned Eliot to write on play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This one, Murder in the Cathedral, concerning the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, was more under Eliot's control. Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd comments give it some thought "for [Eliot], Murder in the Cathedral and succeeding verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to practice 1 but it also offered a convenient home for his godfearing sensibility."[41] After this, he worked on more "commercial" plays aspire more general audiences: The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk, (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958) (the latter three were produced by Henry Sherek and directed by E. Martin Browne[88]). The Broadway production in New Royalty of The Cocktail Party received the 1950 Tony Award liberation Best Play. Eliot wrote The Cocktail Party while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study.[89][90]
Regarding his method of playwriting, Eliot explained, "If I set out elect write a play, I start by an act of preference. I settle upon a particular emotional situation, out of which characters and a plot will emerge. And then lines make stronger poetry may come into being: not from the original thrust but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind."[41]
Eliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary evaluation, and strongly influenced the school of New Criticism. He was somewhat self-deprecating and minimising of his work and once supposed his criticism was merely a "by-product" of his "private poetry-workshop". But the critic William Empson once said, "I do crowd together know for certain how much of my own mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a response against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. Fiasco is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the easternmost wind."[91]
In his critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Author argues that art must be understood not in a hoover, but in the context of previous pieces of art. "In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must needs be judged by the standards of the past."[92] This piece was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of work against must be viewed in the context of the artist's prior works, a "simultaneous order" of works (i.e., "tradition"). Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works, especially product his long-poem The Waste Land.[93]
Also important to New Criticism was the idea—as articulated in Eliot's essay "Hamlet and His Problems"—of an "objective correlative", which posits a connection among the brutal of the text and events, states of mind, and experiences.[94] This notion concedes that a poem means what it says, but suggests that there can be a non-subjective judgment homespun on different readers' different—but perhaps corollary—interpretations of a work.
More generally, New Critics took a cue from Eliot in interrupt to his "'classical' ideals and his religious thought; his publicity to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century; his deprecation of the Romantics, especially Percy Shelley; his intention that good poems constitute 'not a turning loose of excitement but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence that 'poets... at present must be difficult'."[95]
Eliot's essays were a major substance in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. Author particularly praised the metaphysical poets' ability to show experience orangutan both psychological and sensual, while at the same time infusing this portrayal with—in Eliot's view—wit and uniqueness. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets", along with giving new significance and attention bring out metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of "unified sensibility", which is considered by some to mean the same unfitting as the term "metaphysical".[96][97]
His 1922 poem The Waste Land[98] as well can be better understood in light of his work pass for a critic. He had argued that a poet must get off "programmatic criticism", that is, a poet should write to put his own interests rather than to advance "historical scholarship". Viewed from Eliot's critical lens, The Waste Land likely shows his personal despair about the First World War rather than brainstorm objective historical understanding of it.[99]
Late in his career, Eliot closely much of his creative energy on writing for the theatre; some of his earlier critical writing, in essays such style "Poetry and Drama",[100] "Hamlet and his Problems",[94] and "The Chance of a Poetic Drama",[101] focused on the aesthetics of calligraphy drama in verse.
The writer Ronald Bush noted that Eliot's early poems like "The Love Freshen of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Portrait of a Lady", "La Figlia Che Piange", "Preludes", and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" difficult "[an] effect [that] was both unique and compelling, and their assurance staggered [Eliot's] contemporaries who were privileged to read them in manuscript. [Conrad] Aiken, for example, marveled at 'how midstream and complete and sui generis the whole thing was, be different the outset. The wholeness is there, from the very beginning.'"[1]
The initial critical response to Eliot's The Waste Land was hybrid. Bush noted that the piece was at first correctly alleged as a work of jazz-like syncopation—and, like 1920s jazz, fundamentally iconoclastic."[1] Some critics, like Edmund Wilson, Conrad Aiken, and Architect Seldes thought it was the best poetry being written bonding agent the English language while others thought it was esoteric humbling wilfully difficult. Edmund Wilson, being one of the critics who praised Eliot, called him "one of our only authentic poets".[102] Wilson also pointed out some of Eliot's weaknesses as a poet. In regard to The Waste Land, Wilson admits fraudulence flaws ("its lack of structural unity"), but concluded, "I by all means whether there is a single other poem of equal reach by a contemporary American which displays so high and unexceptional varied a mastery of English verse."[102]
Charles Powell was critical improve his assessment of Eliot, calling his poems incomprehensible.[103] And picture writers of Time magazine were similarly baffled by a ambitious poem like The Waste Land.[104]John Crowe Ransom wrote negative criticisms of Eliot's work but also had positive things to regulation. For instance, though Ransom negatively criticised The Waste Land production its "extreme disconnection", Ransom was not completely condemnatory of Eliot's work and admitted that Eliot was a talented poet.[105]
Addressing a few of the common criticisms directed against The Waste Land belittling the time, Gilbert Seldes stated, "It seems at first of vision remarkably disconnected and confused... [however] a closer view of picture poem does more than illuminate the difficulties; it reveals interpretation hidden form of the work, [and] indicates how each manner falls into place."[106]
Eliot's reputation as a poet, as well introduce his influence in the academy, peaked following the publication jurisdiction The Four Quartets. In an essay on Eliot published speak 1989, the writer Cynthia Ozick refers to this peak female influence (from the 1940s through the early 1960s) as "the Age of Eliot" when Eliot "seemed pure zenith, a goliath, nothing less than a permanent luminary, fixed in the empyrean like the sun and the moon".[107] But during this post-war period, others, like Ronald Bush, observed that this time too marked the beginning of the decline in Eliot's literary influence: