T.S Eliot,
The Most Significant English
Poet in the Twentieth Century
By :
Putri Amalia Damayanti (61413025)
Eliot, perhaps the most significant of
the new wave of Symbolists of the 1920’s, startled the world of poetry and
spoke for a lost generation in The Waste Land, engaged literary critics with his landmark book of criticism, The
Sacred Wood, and wrote the most
successful verse play of the twentieth century, The Cocktail Party.
T.S Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, St.
Louis, Missouri, United States. His occupation is Poet, dramatist, literary critic, and editor. His citizen is
American by birth; British from 1927. His education AB in philosophy. He graduated from Harvard University,
Merton College, Oxford.
He lived in period 1905–1965. At that time, the literary movement is
modernism. He wrote many literary works at that time, such as The Wasted Land (1992), The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock (1915), Four Quartets (1945), Murder in the Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), The Dry
Salvages (1941), Little Gidding (1942), The Elder Statesmen, The Journey of the Magi (1927), The Confidential
Clerk, The Sacred Wood (1920), Potrait of a Lady (1881), Burnt Norton (1936), Selected Essays 1917-1932
(1932). He died on 4 January
1965 (aged 76), Kensington, London, England.
Eliot's grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot,
Unitarian minister and founder of schools, a university, and charities, was the
family patriarch, or leader. While carrying on a tradition of public service,
the Eliots never forgot their New England ties. T. S. Eliot claimed that he was
a child of both the Southwest and New England. In Massachusetts he missed
Missouri's dark river, cardinal birds, and lush vegetation. In Missouri he
missed the fir trees, song sparrows, red granite shores, and blue sea of
Massachusetts.
Eliot was the youngest of seven children, one of whom died in
infancy. His sister Abigail was nineteen when Eliot was born, his only brother,
Henry, nine. Eliot’s parents, Henry Ware and Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot,
were in their forties when their last child was born. They had been married for
twenty years. The father was president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company.
Both of Eliot’s parents lived in the shadow of the renowned grandfather.
Eliot’s father suffered the guilt of not having become a clergyman. Charlotte
Eliot, an accomplished person by most standards, believed that she was a
failure because she had not attended college and because her verse, written
mostly for friends but occasionally published in local newspapers, had brought
her no recognition. Charlotte was not comfortable around infants, so during
Eliot’s early years, a nurse looked after him.
Eliot grew
up within the family's tradition of service to religion, community, and
education. Years later he declared, "Missouri and the Mississippi have
made a deeper impression on me than any part of the world." The Eliots
spent summers on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Eliot
knew early that regardless of where he lived, he was a New Englander. Although
he was a Unitarian as well, his nurse had exposed him to services in the Roman
Catholic Church, to which she belonged. In 1927, the year Eliot became a
British subject, he was also confirmed in the Anglican Church.
Eliot received a solid classical education at Smith Academy in St.
Louis. In preparation for his entrance to Harvard in 1906, Eliot attended
Milton Academy in Massachusetts. At Harvard, he finished his bachelor’s degree
in three years. Eliot stayed on from 1909 to 1914 as a graduate student in
English and philosophy. Following the lead of Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist
Movement in Literature (1899), Eliot read the French Symbolists, especially
Jules Laforgue, in whose literary tracks he followed.
Awarded a Sheldon Travelling Fellowship in 1914, Eliot planned to
travel on the Continent, then to take up residence at Merton College, Oxford,
to write his thesis on F. H. Bradley. In July, 1914, he went to Marburg,
Germany, for a summer program in philosophy but left after two weeks because
war was imminent. He married Vivien Haigh-Wood in 1915. Eliot, five feet eleven
inches tall, was handsome and slender, although stooped, sallow, and sad-eyed.
Always meticulously dressed and polished, he fit easily into British life. He visited
the United States only occasionally after 1915.
Shortly after Eliot arrived in England from Marburg, his Harvard
classmate, Conrad Aiken, introduced him to Ezra Pound, who became the most
influential literary influence in Eliot’s life. Pound identified “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock,” written on Eliot’s first trip to Europe in 1910-1911,
as the poem most likely to establish Eliot’s literary reputation. Pound
persuaded Harriet Monroe to publish the poem in Poetry, which she did,
in June, 1915. Subsequently, Eliot’s poems appeared often in Poetry. In
1917, his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, was
published in London.
The Waste Land was unique in
that Eliot supplied extensive notes and references for it, leading readers to view
it as a more formidable document than it actually is. Eliot later confessed
that he added the documentation, much of which is misleading, to fill space.
The poem is more important for its fresh and vigorous use of language and for
its control of metrics than early critics, misled by the documentation,
credited it. The Waste Land broke totally from the post-Romantic literary
tradition, and it had obvious roots in such French Symbolists as Paul Verlaine
and Arthur Rimbaud, in the philosophical quest for salvation found in the works
of Dante and Vergil, and in the English metaphysical poetry of John Donne and
John Dryden. The Waste Land is the first truly modern poem in English in
the twentieth century.
It is remarkable that during Eliot’s most productive period he was
variously a teacher, a bank employee, and, for more than thirty years, a member
of the publishing house of Faber and Gwyer, after 1929 known as Faber& Faber.
Eliot could write for no more than three hours a day, usually composing
directly to his typewriter as he stood at a lectern. Religiously orthodox,
Eliot declared himself to be also a neoclassicist and a royalist, stands that
were uncommon among many intellectuals of his day.
Religious identity was a continuing theme in Eliot’s poetry and
drama, reflecting the personal religious conflicts he experienced. Eliot’s
Ariel poems and Ash Wednesday (1930) express some of the concerns he had
about the acceptance of religious belief and about the discipline such belief
requires. His early dramas, most notably Murder in the Cathedral, a play
in the Greek tradition that uses a chorus, reflect his own religious search.
Eliot’s philosophical
stance and literary methodology were antithetical to Romanticism, which
emphasizes emotion over intellect. Eliot’s artistic aim was to be as objective as
possible but to produce writing that would serve a social function. This aim
led him to experiment with drama in the 1930’s, a decade in which Murder in
the Cathedral was his greatest triumph. His Orestian The Family Reunion
(1939), although it contains some superb writing, confused audiences and
enjoyed little popular success.
With the onset of World War II, Eliot wrote more poetry than
drama, resurrecting “Burnt Norton” (1936) as the first poem of Four Quartets
(1943), which also contained “East Coker” (1940), “The Dry Salvages” (1941),
and “Little Gidding” (1942), poems that deeply reflect his own past and, by
extension, the collective human past. Each of the four poems is autonomous, but
taken collectively, they make a statement about humankind that has an
encompassing philosophical and anthropological impact.
Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, the same
year in which he received the Order of Merit from King George VI. By that time,
Eliot was generally considered the most important poet writing in English. He
heard of his selection for the Nobel Prize while he was in Princeton as a
fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. There, he worked on The Cocktail
Party (1949), which he had begun before he left England.
The play, which enjoyed enormous popular acceptance, was followed
by The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958).
The later plays were concerned with the philosophical and moral issues with which
Eliot had long been grappling, but they avoided the pitfalls of The Family
Reunion and delivered their didactic message indirectly.
The Cocktail Party, witty and
delightfully farcical, was Eliot’s greatest commercial success, although the musical
extravaganza, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats (1981), based on Eliot’s Old
Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), has become one of the most
commercially successful shows of the twentieth century, having far surpassed
The Cocktail Party in popular appeal.
Eliot, ever the gentleman in appearance and actions, was
clearly an elitist. This austere posture, however, did not prevent his
helping young writers of promise throughout his life, which was neither
easy nor happy. His first wife, Vivien, from whom he was separated in
1932, suffered from mental illness and was institutionalized for much
of their married life. She died in 1947.
On January 10, 1957, Eliot married Valerie Fletcher, who
had worked for him at Faber&Faber for eight years. In their nearly
eight years together before Eliot’s death, Valerie, who keenly
understood and appreciated Eliot’s work, brought more light and joy into
his life than he had experienced since he reached adulthood.
History will probably treat Eliot’s poetry with more interest than
it treats his plays or, perhaps, his literary criticism, both of which will
likely be read more for their ability to elucidate his enigmatic poetry than
for their not inconsiderable merits. Clearly, Eliot was not only one of the
most prolific writers of his age but also a man of immense social conscience
and artistic integrity. Like his grandfather, Eliot was convinced that one’s purpose
in life is to build enduring structures and institutions that serve humanity.
The Eliot of the 1920’s spoke directly to the intellectuals of the
so-called Lost Generation, who also heeded the call of writers such as Ernest
Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, and Pound. Eliot, however, was made of
different stuff than the expatriates who flocked to Paris and its environs
after World War I. Eliot constructed his castles of the mind while he led the
routine existence of a young, newly married businessman struggling hard in a
quite humdrum bank job to sustain himself and his wife. If the indecisive
prewar J. Alfred Prufrock was essentially the early Eliot, as surely this self-caricature
was, the later poetry, especially The Waste Land, is a
depersonalized commentary on a generation that seems truly lost socially,
religiously, and ethically, a world of displaced and shadowy figures.
Eliot’s break from the Romantic poets and his conscious experiments
with new poetic rhythms that conform to normal speech patterns established him
as a pioneering poet who dared to turn from established conventions in both the
style and substance of poetry. In doing so, he led the way for poets such as W.
H. Auden and Robert Lowell, whose work has close affinities to that of Eliot.
At the same time, The Waste Land forged the way for the long, modernist
poem, comparable in scope to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). William
Carlos Williams’s Paterson (1946-1958), Hart Crane’s The Bridge (1930),
and Pound’s The Cantos (1925-1969) are notable among the long poems that
owe a considerable debt to The Waste Land.
—R. Baird Shuman
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