The publication of Four Quartets led to his recognition as the greatest living English poet and man of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Early years. Eliot was descended from a distinguished New England family that had relocated to St. Louis, Mo. His family allowed him the widest education available in his time, with no influence from his father to be “practical” and go into business. From Smith Academy in St. Louis he went to Milton, in Massachusetts; from Milton he entered Harvard in 1906; he was graduated B.A. in 1009, after three instead of the usual four years.
The men who influenced him at Harvard were George Santayana, the philosopher and poet, and the critic Irving Babbitt. From Babbitt he derived an anti-Romantic attitude that, amplified by his later reading of British philosophers F. H. Bradley and T. E. Hulme, lasted through his life. In the academic year 1909-10 he was an assistant in philosophy at Harvard. He spent the year 1910-11 in France, attending Henri Bergson’s lectures in philosophy at the Sorbonne and reading poetry with Alain-Fournier. p. 452) Eliot’s study of the poetry of Dante, of the English writers John Webster and John Donne, and of the French Symbolist Jules Laforgue helped him to find his own style. From 1911 to 1914 he was back at Harvard reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit. In 1913 he read Bradley’s Appearance and Reality; by 1916 he had finished, in Europe, a dissertation entitled Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. But World War I had intervened, and he never returned to Harvard to take the final oral examination for the Ph.D. degree. In 1914 Eliot met and began a close association with the American poet Ezra Pound. Early Publications. Eliot was to pursue four careers: editor, dramatist, literary critic, and philosophical poet. He was probably the most erudite poet of his time in the English language. His undergraduate poems were “literary” and conventional. His first important publication, and the first masterpiece of “modernism” in English, was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. ” Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky
The Essay on ELIOT TS
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St.Louis Missouri, to Henry Ware and Charlotte Stearns Elliot. His father was a businessman, and his mother was a poetress. Eliot came from a financially endowed family and was allowed to attend all of the best schools. His education started at the prestigies grammar school Smith Academy in St.Louis. He then went to secondary school in ...
Like a patient etherized upon a table…. Although Pound had printed privately a small book, A lume spento, as early as 1908, “Prufrock” was the first poem by either of these literary revolutionists to go beyond experiment to achieve perfection. It represented a break with the immediate past as radical as that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads (1798).
From the appearance of Eliot’s first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917, one may conveniently date the maturity of the 20th-century poetic revolution.
The significance of the revolution is still disputed, but the striking similarity to the Romantic revolution of Coleridge and Wordsworth is obvious: Eliot and Pound, like their 18th-century counterparts, set about reforming poetic diction. Whereas Wordsworth thought he was going back to the “real language of men,” Eliot struggled to create new verse rhythms based on the rhythms of contemporary speech. He sought a poetic diction that might be spoken by an educated person, being “neither pedantic nor vulgar. For a year Eliot taught French and Latin at the Highgate School; in 1917 he began his brief career as a bank clerk in Lloyds Bank Ltd. Meanwhile he was also a prolific reviewer and essayist in both literary criticism and technical philosophy. In 1919 he published Poems, which contained the poem “Gerontion,” a meditative interior monologue in blank verse: nothing like this poem had appeared in English. The Waste Land and Criticism. With the publication in 1922 of his poem The Waste Land, Eliot won an international reputation.
The Essay on Dramatic Monologue Prufrock Poem Eliot
This poem, the earliest of Eliot's major works, was completed in 1910 or 1911 but not published until 1915. It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man -- overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted. Prufrock, the poem's speaker, seems to be addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like to 'force the moment to its crisis' by somehow consummating ...
The Waste Land expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of vignettes, loosely linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. The poem’s style is highly complex, erudite, and allusive, and the poet provided notes and references to explain the work’s many quotations and allusions. This cholarly supplement distracted some readers and critics from perceiving the true originality of the poem, which lay rather in its rendering of the universal human predicament of man desiring salvation, and in its manipulation of language, than in its range of literary references. In his earlier poems Eliot had shown himself to be a master of the poetic phrase. The Waste Land showed him to be, in addition, a metrist of great virtuosity, capable of astonishing modulations ranging from the sublime to the conversational.
The Waste Land consists of five sections and proceeds on a principle of “rhetorical discontinuity” that reflects the fragmented experience of the 20th-century sensibility of the great modern cities of the West. Eliot expresses the hopelessness and confusion of purpose of life in the secularized city, the decay of urbs aeterna (the “eternal city”).
This is the ultimate theme of The Waste Land, concretized by the poem’s constant rhetorical shifts and its juxtapositions of contrasting styles.
But The Waste Land is not a simple contrast of the heroic past with the degrade present; it is rather a timeless, simultaneous awareness of moral grandeur and moral evil. The poem’s original manuscript of about 80 lines was cut down to 433 at the suggestion of Ezra Pound. The Waste Land is not Eliot’s greatest poem, though it is his most famous. Eliot said that the poet-critic must write “programmatic criticism” – that is, criticism that expresses the pot’s own interests as a poet, quite different from historical scholarship, which stops at placing the poet in his background.
Consciously intended or not, Eliot’s criticism created an atmosphere in which his own poetry could be better understood and appreciated than if it had to appear in a literary milieu dominated by the standards of the preceding age. In the essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” appearing in his first critical volume, The Sacred Wood (1920), Eliot asserts that tradition, as used by the poet, is not a mere repetition of the work of the immediate past (“novelty is better than repetition,” he said); rather, it comprises the whole of European literature from homer t the present.
The Essay on Thomas Stearns Eliot Eliots Poems Poem
... the face of modern poetry" (Costa 96). Eliot is considered one of the greatest poets and equally one of the greatest critics to ever live ... effort and futility of effort is central in Eliots poems" (Mays 111). Another poem, The Waste Land was written i 1922 and it contrasts ... "Thomas Stearns Eliot has been considered by many to be the leading American poet of this century. His poem The Waste Land is a ...
The poet writing in English may therefore make his own tradition by using materials from any past period, in any language. This point of view is “programmatic” in the sense that it disposes the reader to accept the revolutionary novelty of Eliot’s polyglot quotations and serious parodies of other poets’ styles in The Waste Land. Also in The Sacred Wood, “Hamlet and His Problems” sets forth Eliot’s heory of the objective correlative: His only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set f objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that, when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. Eliot used the phrase “objective correlative” in the context of his own impersonal theory of poetry; it thus had an immense influence toward correcting the vagueness of late Victorian rhetoric by insisting on a correspondence of word and object.
Two other essays, first published the year after The Sacred Wood, almost complete the Eliot critical canon: “The Metaphysical Poets” and “Andrew Marvell,” published in Selected Essays, 1917-1932. In these essays he affects a new historical perspective on the hierarchy of English poetry, putting at the top of Donne and other Metaphysical poets of the 17th-century and lowering poets of the 18th and 19th-centuries. Eliot’s second famous phrase appears her – “dissociation of sensibility,” invented to explain the change that came over English poetry after Donne and Andrew Marvell.
This change seems to him to consist in a loss of the union of thought and feeling. The phrase has been attacked, yet the historical fact that gave rise to it cannot be denied, and with the poetry of Eliot and Pound it had a strong influence in reviving interest in certain 17th-century poets. The first, or programmatic, phrase of Eliot’s criticism ended with The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) – his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard.
The Term Paper on British Poetry
... All of theses poets played their role in establishing a black context in the British poetry. Noteably it ... process from the likes of Yeats and Eliot and on to Auden, Dylan Thomas, Philip ... and Racine's Phaedra Britannica. His first collection of poems, The Loiners (1970), was awarded the Geoffrey ... and others, often published by the Ferry and Fulcrum Presses, showed that British poetry was never to ...
Shortly before this his interests had broadened into theology and sociology; three short books, or long essays, were the result: Thoughts After Lambeth (1931), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948).
These book-essays, along with his Dante (1929), an indubitable masterpiece, broadened the base of literature into theology and philosophy: whether a work is poetry must be decided by literary standards; whether it is great poetry must be decided by standards higher than the literary.
Eliot’s criticism and poetry are so interwoven that it is difficult to discuss them separately. The great essay on Dante appeared two years after Eliot was confirmed in the Church of England (1927); in that year he also became a British subject. The first long poem after his conversion was “Ash Wednesday” (1930), a religious meditation in a style entirely different from that of any of the earlier poems. “Ash Wednesday” expresses the pangs and the strain involved in the acceptance of religious belief and religious discipline.
This and subsequent poems were written in a more relaxed, musical, and meditative style than his earlier works, in which the dramatic element had been stronger than the lyrical. “Ash Wednesday” was not well received in an era that held that poetry, though autonomous, is strictly secular in its outlook; it was misinterpreted by some critics as an expression of personal disillusion. Later poetry and plays. Eliot’s masterpiece is Four Quartets, which was issued as a book in 1943, though each “quartet” is a complete poem. The first of the quartets, “Burnt Norton,” had appeared in the Collected Poems of 1936.
It is a subtle meditation on the nature of time and its relation to eternity. On the model of this Eliot wrote three more poems, “East Coker” (1940), “The Dry Salvages” (1941), and “Little Gidding” (1942), in which he explored through images of great beauty and haunting power his own past, the past of the human race, and the meaning of human history. Each of the poems was self-subsistent; but when published together they were seen to make up a single work, in which themes and images recurred and were developed in a musical manner and brought to a final resolution.
The Essay on Dylan Marais Thomas Poems Poetry Work
"I've had eighteen straight whiskies. I think that's the record." (Quoted by John Malcolm Bringin, Dylan Thomas in America). One of the most renowned authors of the twentieth century, Dylan Thomas is as well known for his philosophical poetry, critical writings, and essays. Often focusing on themes as birth, death, love, and religion, Thomas's works remain distinctly personal through a blend of ...
This work made a deep impression on the reading public, and even those who were unable to accept the poems’ Christian beliefs recognized the intellectual integrity with which Eliot pursued his high theme, the originality [page. 453] of the form he had devised, and the technical mastery of his verse. This work led to the award to Eliot, in 1948, of the Nobel Prize for Literature. An outstanding example of Eliot’s verse in Four Quartets is the passage in “Little Gidding” in which the poet meets a “compound ghost,” a figure composite of two of his masters: William Butler Yeats and Stephane Mallarme.
The scene takes place at dawn in London after a night on duty at an air-raid post during an air-attack; the master speaks in conclusion: From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer. The day was breaking. In the disfigured street He left me, with a kind of valediction, And faded on the blowing of the horn. The passage is 72 lines, in modified terza rima; the diction is as near to that of Dante as is possible in English; and it is a fine example of Eliot’s belief that a poet can be entirely original when he is closest to his models.
Eliot’s plays, which begin with Sweeney Agonistes (published 1926; first performed in 1934) and end with The Elder Statesman (first performed 1958; published 1959), are, with the exception of Murder in the Cathedral (first published and performed 1935), inferior to the lyric and meditative poetry. Eliot’s belief that even secular drama attracts people who unconsciously seek a religion led him to put drama above all other forms of poetry. All his plays are in a blank verse of his own invention, in which the metrical effect is not brought “poetic drama” back the popular stage.
The Family Reunion (1939) and Murder in the Cathedral are Christian tragedies, the former a tragedy of revenge, the latter of the sin of pride. Murder in the Cathedral is a modern miracle play on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. The most striking feature of this, his most successful play, was the use of a chorus in the traditional Greek manner to make apprehensible to common humanity the meaning of the heroic action. The Family Reunion (1939) was less popular.
The Term Paper on Poetic Drama /Verse Drama of Modern age
... on the matter of verse style in his own first major poetic drama, Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot writes, “As for the ... is a rich and mysterious «radio parable play» in verse. The tradition of verse drama has continued to attract writers, and they have ... Greek drama. The producer must decide the method which will project most effectively in the theatre these recurring choral passages, ...
It contained scenes of great poignancy and some the finest dramatic verse since the Elizabethans; but the public found this translation of the story of Orestes into a modern domestic drama baffling and was uneasy at the mixture of psychological realism, mythical apparitions at a drawing-room window, and a comic chorus of uncles and aunts. After World War II, Eliot returned to writing plays with The Cocktail Party in 1949, The Confidential Clerk in 1953, and The Elder Statesman in 1958. These plays are comedies in which plots are derived from Greek drama.
In them Eliot accepted current theatrical conventions at their most conventional, subduing his style to a conversational level and eschewing the lyrical passages that gave beauty to his earlier plays. Only The Cocktail Party, which is based upon the Alcestis of Euripides, achieved a popular success. In spite of their obvious theatrical defects and a failure to engage the sympathies of the audience for the characters, these plays succeed in handling moral and religious issues of some complexity while entertaining the audience with farcical plots and some shrewd social satire. Eliot’s career as editor was ncillary to his main interests, but his quarterly review, The Criterion (1922-39), was the most distinguished international critical journal of the period. He was a “director” or working editor, of the publishing firm of Faber & Faber Ltd. from the early 1920s until his death, and as such was a generous and discriminating patron of young poets. Eliot always kept his private life rigorously in the background. In 1915 he married Vivian Haigh-Wood; after 1933 she was mentally ill, and they lived apart; she died in 1947. In January 1957 he married Valerie Fletcher, with whom he lived happily until his death.