Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)

American upbringing and studies in Europe

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St Louis, Missouri, into a family of English descent. In 1906 he went to
Harvard, where he gained his M.A. degree. He then went to the Sorbonne in Paris to study the philosophy of Henri
Bergson, whose lectures he attended. In France he began to read the work of the French Symbolists. He then travelled to
Germany, where he continued to study literature and philosophy. At the outbreak of World War I, in 1914, he was
obliged to leave Germany and went to Merton College, Oxford, to study philosophy. All of these influences will later be
found in his major works.
Imagism
Ezra Pound contributed much to the development of Modernism in England: he is responsible for the principles of
the first modernist manifesto in English poetry, which were:
. Dire
ct treatment of the subject
. To
use no words that do not contribute directly to the poem’s sense
. To
use clear, concrete language, not abstractions
. To
use new rhythms, such as free verse, to express new moods
. The
most famous example of this is In a station of the Metro, 1913,
The apparition of these faces in a crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.
Haiku
Typical characteristics
"Haiku" in English is a term sometimes loosely applied to any short, impressionistic poem, but there are certain
characteristics that are commonly associated with the genre:
 a focus on nature or the seasons
 a division into two asymmetrical sections that juxtaposes two subjects (e.g. something natural and something
human-made, two unexpectedly similar things, etc.)
 a contemplative or wistful tone and an impressionistic brevity
 "telegram style" syntax; no superfluous words
 an emphasis on imagery over exposition
 avoidance of metaphor and similes
 non-rhyming lines

The meeting with Pound and the difficult years

In England Eliot taught in London for a while, but in 1915 he went to work in Lloyd’s bank, a position which he held
until 1925. Through the influence of his fellow American poet Ezra Pound, the magazine
Poetry published Eliot’s first major poem: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917). The years 1915-25 were a great
strain on Eliot. Money problems, having to work full-time in a bank, poor relations with his wife, his own nervous
instability, and a general dissatisfaction with modern life common to most artists
of the period – all of these concurred to bring him on the verge of a nervous breakdown by November 1921. He went
for rest and medical treatment first to Margate, southern England, and then to a Swiss sanatorium in Lausanne. During
this time he finished the first draft of The Waste Land. On his way back to London he stopped in Paris to submit the
manuscript to Ezra Pound, who made extensive cuts and
helped him give the poem its final shape.
From nihilism to faith
The Waste Land came out in 1922 and made Eliot the leading modernist poet writing in English. He left his work at the
bank and became a director of a publishing house, while he continued to write poetry (The Hollow Men, 1925). The late
1920s and the 1930s were important years for Eliot, who in religion found a way out of nihilism. His gradual
acceptance of the Christian faith – he was officially received into the Anglican Church in 1927, the year in which he
also became a British subject – is reflected in the poems he wrote during the late 1920s: The Journey of the Magi (1927)
and Ash Wednesday (1930). This
reached its culmination with Eliot’s best-known play, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), based on the martyrdom of
Thomas Becket, and with the collection of poems Four Quartets (1943).
Eliot’s last plays
After World War II Eliot was mostly occupied with drama, criticism and reviewing. Beginning with The Family
Reunion (1939), he developed a new kind of drama in which he tried to combine the presentation of religious or
philosophical themes with contemporary subjects and the language of drawing-room conversation. His later plays, The
Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959), follow this general trend,
treating religious and moral themes through sophisticated social comedies. In 1948 he received both the Nobel Prize for
literature and the British Order of Merit from King George VI. In the last years of his life he led a retired though active
life, writing, lecturing and giving public readings of his poems. He died in London in 1965.
The critic
Eliot’s prestige as a literary critic is as great as his prestige as a writer. His first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood,
appeared in 1920. Tradition and Individual Talent followed in 1922 (in which Eliot expressed his famous theory of
tradition as essential to the modern poet). His social criticism is equally valuable though seldom quoted, perhaps
because it is disturbing in its pitiless attack on modern society. Essays like The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and
Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1943) raise fundamental questions about our way of life and the direction
modern society is taking.
Selected Essays
In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Eliot presents his conception of tradition and the theory of impersonal
poetry. For Eliot artistic creation is a process of depersonalisation and an "escape from emotion.". Great works do not
express the personal unique emotion of the poet. The poet is viewed as a medium, through which tradition is channelled
and elaborated, and whose feelings and emotions are synthesised to create an artistic image.
Eliot does not think that a poet's greatness lies in his departure from his predecessors. For him, the term "tradition"
represents a "simultaneous order,"– a fusion of past and present. For Eliot, talent is acquired through a careful study of
poetry, to have a poetic understanding of the poets before him –not a knowledge of facts.
In conclusion, a poet must embody "the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer," while, simultaneously,
expressing his contemporary environment.
Another essay found in Selected Essays relates to this notion of the impersonal poet. In "Hamlet and His Problems"
Eliot presents the phrase "objective correlative.” ‘The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
"objective correlative"... a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular
emotion.’ The theory is that the expression of emotion in art can be achieved by specific objects, including events and
situations. A particular emotion is created by presenting its correlated objective sign. The author is depersonalised in
this conception, and, it is the sign, and not the poet, which creates emotion.

Questions
1 What job did Eliot find when he moved to London in 1915?
2 How did Ezra Pound help him?
3 Explain Eliot’s personal troubles in the period when he wrote The Waste Land.
4 How did his life change after 1922?
5 What works reflect his conversion to the Christian faith?
6 What characterizes Eliot’s social comedies?
7 When did Eliot receive the Nobel Prize?
8 How did he spend his final years?
9 Was Eliot interested in social criticism as well as literature?

The Waste Land (1922)

Historical background of “The Waste Land”
Against the backdrop of a devastated Europe with the portentous rise of nationalism, social fragmentation and growi
ng economic turmoil, “The Waste Land” was written in an atmosphere of uncertainty and
creative experimentation. Europe had seen the unparalleled horror of the First World War with 
death on an unimaginable scale and the seeds of fascism were firmly planted in the ruins. In Britain, 
two million were unemployed after economic collapse, and the traditional social order was falling apart. 
This was a period of economic turmoil, hardship and desperation yet paradoxically it was also a time of unparalleled we
alth and technological advance.
Cultural and spiritual sterility
“The Waste Land” is considered by many as the most important poem of the 20th century. It expresses the modern
artist’s disillusion with the modern world and the desperate need and search for a new tradition. It also represents the
nihilistic culmination of Eliot’s career. The poet sees only ruins and desolation around him after the decay of western
civilization that followed WWI.
The central metaphor of the poem is the spiritual dryness and sterility of modern life, the death of western culture
through a lack of any belief, religious or other, that can give meaning to everyday existence.
The poem is an insight into the modern world, a world in which older certainties  have disappeared, a 
world of death and destruction, of meaningless relationships, and of a profound absence of spiritual, 
cultural and social assurances. Going through this waste land we are shown various snapshots of a 
"dead" world, yet we are also offered glimpses of the possibility of restoring the world of the waste land once more to w
holeness and fertility. 
The mythical structure of the poem
“The Waste Land” is built on myth and anthropology. It takes the myth of the Holy Grail as its basis and through it
tries to project a complete view of the failure of western civilization, expressed through a series of images of sterility
and chaos.
To express this theme, “The Waste Land” brings together images of modern decadence with images, echoes and
quotations from ancient myths and legends. The many references to sterility and fertility provide a framework for all the
various fragments of the poem. The order of myth is thus projected on to the chaos of modern life. In The Waste Land’s
apparent chaos there is, in fact, a method: themes, symbols, quotations and internal cross-references make up the
structure of the poem.
Intentional fragmentation
“The Waste Land” cannot be reconstructed into a coherent, logically ordered narrative or message: the images are
juxtaposed, not logically ordered. The fragmentation of the poem is the reflection of the fragmentation of contemporary
culture, in which the individual must find a personal ordering or interpretation.
Eliot wants us to experience that sense of fragmentation for ourselves, and this is why the 
poem uses a kind of collage technique assembling chunks of texts together in what seems a random and arbitrary way to 
recreate this sense of cultural rubble. 

Eliot’s method
Technically, The Waste Land is characterized by a series of typically modernist features:
. the
lack of traditional structure and the absence of any narrative order -its five unequal sections show no realistic or
logical continuity
. the
juxtapposition of past and present
. myth
as an ordering factor
. the
time shift which reveals a stream of consciousness technique based on free association of thoughts in man’s mind
. quot
ations from or allusions to many writers. The use of Dante is typical: the crowds flowing over London Bridge at the
end of The Burial of the Dead are modelled on the crowds of damned souls in Dante’s Inferno
. the
use of various languages, philosophies and religious traditions
. the
metrical pattern too reflects the poem’s variety: lines vary in length and rhythm, although there are some regularities
and rhymes
The poem is divided into 5 sections: The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water,
What the Thunder Said.

Questions
1. In
what way is The Waste Land the expression of Eliot’s early nihilism?
2. Com
ment on the central metaphor of the poem
3. Why
does Eliot use a fragmented style?
4. Expl
ain the modernist style use in the poem