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T. S. Eliot


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T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-British poet and literary critic, author of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) won numerous awards and honours in his lifetime, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. His early and experimental poetical works depict a bleak and barren soullessness, often in spare yet finely crafted modern verse;

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
--from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Another of his famous and oft-quoted works, The Waste Land (1922) deals with dark and haunting themes of individual consciousness and spiritual desolation against the decline of civilisation. Conrad's Heart of Darkness comes to mind as Eliot innovatively rejects traditional Romantic ideals through allusion and symbolism. From the first line "April is the cruellest month.." to the last "Shantih shantih shantih" we can intuit the dramatic scope and evolution of Eliot's own life in the Biblical, cultural, historical, and literary references that helped shape one of the 20th century's most profound figures in literature.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Charlotte Stearns and Henry Ware Eliot. He attended Harvard University before studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, earning a B.A. and M.A. in English Literature. In 1914 he settled in England and worked as a schoolmaster and eventually met and became friends with many popular writers of the time including Ezra Pound. In 1915 he married Vivien Haigh Wood (they would separate in 1933). Around the time he was working with Lloyds Bank of London he also started editing the Egoist (1917–1919). Soon after he was publishing his own quarterly literary journal Criterion which would become one of the most acclaimed publications of the genre.

In 1925, busy working with the publishing house Faber and Faber he also continued to write many poems and essays. In 1927 he entered the Anglican church and became a British subject. He also wrote many plays including The Rock: A Pageant Play (1934); Murder in the Cathedral (1935); The Family Reunion (1939); The Cocktail Party (1950); The Confidential Clerk (1954); and The Elder Statesman (1959). In 1957 he married Valerie Fletcher. Collections of his plays include; Poems (1920); Poems 1909-1925 (1925); Ash Wednesday (1930); Four Quartets (1935–42); On Poetry and Poets (1957); Collected Poems 1909-1962 (1963).

Eliot's vast collection of critical works include; The Sacred Wood (1920); For Lancelot Andrewes (1928); Selected Essays, 1917–32 (1932); The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933); After Strange Gods (1934); Elizabethan Essays (1934); Essays Ancient and Modern (1936); and Notes towards a Definition of Culture (1948).

Thomas Stearns Eliot died on 4 January 1965, his ashes interred at the Parish Church of Saint Michael in East Coker, Somerset, England from whence his ancestors came. There is a memorial to Eliot in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey, London, England, his epitaph reading; "The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living"

"In my beginning is my end. ..In my end is my beginning."--from Four Quartets, "East Coker"

Biography written by C.D. Merriman for Jalic Inc. Copyright Jalic Inc. 2006. All Rights Reserved.

The above biography is copyrighted. Do not republish it without permission.

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Recent Forum Posts on T. S. Eliot

Please help me (THE WASTE LAND) analysis

Hello Please I want you to help me and give me some information about (theme, figures of speech ,style, rhym and diction) of THE WASTE LAND by T.S.ELiot Please I need for these elements before my exam it will be after 4 days:bawling:

Posted By The Queen at Fri 29 May 2009, 7:35 PM in Eliot, T. S. || 2 Replies

Landscapes- TS Eliot

As in the five little poems under that title. What are your thoughts on them? Especially Virginia as I've heard some bizarre interpretations of it.

Posted By kelby_lake at Sun 19 Apr 2009, 11:44 AM in Eliot, T. S. || 1 Reply

the objective correlative

This term showed up on a question on my practice GRE and I have yet to understand it. Here's what I've read so far... In his essay, "Hamlet and his Problems", Eliot says "the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." In my humble reading, it sounds like Eliot is saying that emotion is triggered when readers see or experience a certain important object/situation/chain of events...like a symbol. That seems like a very simplistic reading to me. Would someone care to explain it in more depth? And could someone give an example of an objective correlative used in a novel? It's not terribly important that I understand the term deeply, just that I'm able to recognize an instance of it when given a passage of prose.

Posted By Wilde woman at Tue 24 Mar 2009, 4:10 AM in Eliot, T. S. || 4 Replies

Early work or Later work?

Since this forum is very dead, and since Eliot deserves more: Do you prefer the work marking Eliot's career (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, &c), or his later works, mostly those after his conversion to Anglicanism (Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets). Personally, I feel like Nietzsche did when Wagner converted to Christianity, a religious bias?

Posted By mayneverhave at Wed 10 Dec 2008, 11:56 PM in Eliot, T. S. || 0 Replies

T.S. Eliot

I've been reading T.S. Eliot's Prufrock and The Waste Land. Very impressive. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock strikes me as a perfect anti-carpe diem poem, all about hesitation and preemptive regret and not-- as the horrible advertising world has it-- "just doing it". Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. There is a delightful and insightful mixing of the profound and the trivial going on here, with the mention of toast and tea. And again: I have measured out my life with coffee spoons Eliot does not shy away from the trivial aspect of life in this poem, which yet is anything but trivial. He hammers away with the phrase, "do I dare?" And indeed there will be time To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?" Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair and again, Do I dare Disturb the universe? There is something terribly honest in the anti-heroic tone. It is the very opposite of glib triumphalism.

Posted By curlyqlink at Sun 2 Nov 2008, 11:05 AM in Eliot, T. S. || 1 Reply

The Wasteland essay advice - don't worry I've already written too much

I'm writing an analysis of The Wasteland that has to be 4-6 pages in length, and no more. It's at five now, but I want to explore modernism and the mythical method a lot more... so it's either abandon that topic or completely rewrite the paper. So if anyone has the time/interest to read what I've got so far, any critique would be much appreciated! Peace, Polly Dream Symbolism as Mythical Method in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land Elevated by many critics as one modernist poetry’s great paradigms, The Waste Land exemplifies “the mythical method,” a process of structure invented by the poem’s author, T.S. Eliot. Through this method, Eliot connects parallel symbols and images from literary history with present-day symbols and images. The disjunction between one moment and the next, as well as between seemingly random images, is akin to the mental state during a dream. It can be interpreted in the same way we can interpret dreams. Because readers cannot rely on time to map out the poem’s order for them, they must find order in Eliot’s analogies in order to construct the meaning of the poem. The Waste Land’s “mythical method” takes form in the unification of abstract concepts. Using the death and regeneration of nature as a model for its mythical method, the poem is divided into five sections, each corresponding to a season in the aforementioned cycle of time. Each section explores the struggle between fertility and barrenness, referencing a fragmentary collection of images, anecdotes and allusions to sources ranging from the Bible to Eastern philosophy to ancient literature. It has been argued that T.S. Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land” lacks a theme or argument, and that its images do not function as symbols or metaphors. The idea of fertility, however, permeates the fragmentary collection of images, anecdotes and allusions (to sources ranging from the Bible to Eastern philosophy to ancient literature), and myriad metaphors litter the poem’s landscape. The most notable of these metaphors are those regarding water and vegetation, symbolizing, in their many forms and states, the poem’s struggle between fertility and barrenness. In his essay, “The Waste Land: Ur-Text of Deconstruction,” Ruth Nevo declares the poem absent of every single fundamental category of literary discourse: "There is no single time or place but a constant, bewildering shifting and disarray of times and places; there is no unifying central character either speaking or spoken about, no protagonist or antagonist… Nor, similarly, can we differentiate a subject in the sense of an overall subject matter, or argument, or myth, or theme for the poem to be unequivocally about or to embody." I agree that “The Waste Land” lacks all of the above-listed qualities, except for that of the subject matter. The poem is most certainly “unequivocally about” something, that something being fertility, or, rather, the lack thereof. This theme is introduced in the very first line, with the word “breeding”: “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land…”(1-2) April traditionally takes on cheerful and youthful characteristics, but here it is the object of scorn for the speaker (whose identity shifts throughout the poem). April is “cruel” because it is capable of regeneration, while human’s, in the protagonist’s society, have been afflicted with infertility. The letters of John Donne exhibit a view of Spring similar to that displayed in the first stanza of The Waste Land, so strikingly similar, in fact, that I suspect that Eliot was familiar with this particular letter: “Because I am in a place and season where I see every thing bud forth, I must do so too… the pleasantness of the season displeases me. Everything refreshes, and I wither, and I grow older and not better, my strength diminishes, and my load growes.” As if anticipating that, hundreds of years later, a will poet speak what are said to be the first words of a new movement (modernism) by invoking a sentiment he felt first, Donne’s relation of his emotions serve as a pre-emptive explanation of Eliot’s first stanza. Donne’s aging without “refreshing” is echoed in The Waste Land’s structure; the passage of time and the cycle of season does not provide regeneration to humans as it does to vegetation. That April symbolizes cruelty and presents the setting as “dead land” is non-traditional imagery, but that doesn’t mean it completely lacks symbolism. Nevo states that the poem’s symbols do not perform the “functions” of foci: "They refuse to symbolize. They explode and proliferate. They turn themselves inside out, diffuse their meanings, and collapse back again into disarticulated images… Is water, or the sea, death or life? Is fire a lust of the flesh or a purity of the spirit?... Or are these possibilities in unceasing dialectical interchange; idea and image, essence and existence, appearance and reality?... there is a language which this mode of phantasmagoria resembles, the language of the unconscious, with its condensations, substitutions, displacements, and are then challenged to find an interpretive key to this dream, we cannot."(456) Before I discuss the idea the unconscious in relation to The Waste Land, I must point out that some of the poem’s symbols are traditional metaphors. “And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water…”(23-24) This passage presents the two kinds of symbols Eliot uses in the poem: the a priori symbol and the a posteriori symbol. The tree as a source of shelter is an image that speaks to the reader’s common sense, while the cricket that gives no relief is an allusion to Ecclesiastes XII, a connection that the reader can only make through experience. The dry stone with “no sound of water” could symbolize many things a priori, but those readers who picked up on the theme of breeding from the opening line have a posteriori knowledge that gives a hint as to where to follow the metaphor; “dry” often means “barren,” and water clearly symbolizes vitality, or, for this poem’s purpose, fertility. We do not possess “an interpretive key” to The Waste Land, but rather molds for two different kinds of key, which we can shape to each individual image. The connection Nevo makes between the language of the unconscious and the poems “dialectical interchange” begs further exploration. It was this criticism that inspired me to approach the poem as if it were a sequence of five dreams, each comprised of a disjointed story-like experience and seemingly incoherent images. My opinion on the interpretation of dream symbols is best expressed in Dr. Anoceto Aremoni’s introduction to Eduardo Zajur’s That Other Existence: “Dreams constitute for a form of individual production in which conventional and circumstantial universal symbols are present. The other symbols… are those of individual creation … Dreams, he says, are the masked tools which are available to the analyst and which he can use to challenge the negative forces within the patients themselves.” The conventional symbols, in The Waste Land, are those metaphors which we, as analysts of the narrator’s dream, have little to no difficulty translating into literal meanings. The narrator’s frequent allusions literary texts are our “circumstantial universal symbols,” which we need hints from the author, in the form of Eliot’s notes, in order to use them to make connections about the poem. Everything that impatient readers, like Nevo, brush off as too complex or obscure to make into a meaning are Eliot’s “secrets,” his symbols “of individual creation.” The end of the Autumn section, features one of the daughters of the Thames– she who has been “rudely forced” like Philomel – singing, “On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with Nothing.” Spanos’ discovery reveals in the narrator the ability to converse with the texts of history, communicates a failure to connect time in temporal continuity. Lack of temporal continuity and the haziness of connections to what we know of history and literature are characteristics of dreams. By approaching Eliot’s writing as if it were derived from dreams, we come closer to understanding his mythical method, which juxtaposes many seemingly unrelated ideas and symbols. The grouping of symbols into three kinds of dream symbols, as well as into a posteriori and a prior, provide us with a basis for assigning order to the poem. When left with seemingly un-interpretable symbols, we can look to outside texts and ideas which Eliot does not allude to; symbolism is subjective, and if we find a source of light onto Eliot’s idea that resonates with us (couldn't figure out how to end that sentence) (and even if I decide to end it here I'll still need a conclusion, something I suck at)

Posted By elibats at Thu 3 Jul 2008, 9:16 PM in Eliot, T. S. || 3 Replies

critical essay on T.S Eliot

we have just started studying T.S Eliot and I am really fascinated by him and by his works (we have already read "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock, which I loved, and we are currently reading The Waste Land). I like his poems first because of the way they sound, but then I have some difficulties in understanding their meaning (well, to tell the truth, my personal interpretation does not always get along with that given by my teacher:D )...so, I was just wondering whether you could suggest some critical essay on T.S Eliot by someone expert in the field (the book my teacher uses as a guide often can't answer our questions...i.e: in The Waste Land, verse 25, "There is shadow under this red rock"; why is the rock red?). Thank you a lot!

Posted By Silvia at Tue 22 Apr 2008, 1:43 PM in Eliot, T. S. || 0 Replies

Eliot's Mermaids

Since I first read Prufrock I'd always assumed that the closing lines alluded to the legend of Urashima Taro. As the story apparently isn't as canonical as I'd imagined, I'll give a brief summary: A fisherman saves a turtle, to learn that she is in fact the daughter of the King of the Sea. He is rewarded with the ability to breathe underwater, a timeless and dreamlike existence among the merfolk, and a box which he is warned not to open. After some time he opens the box (the reasons vary from account to account) to awake an old man whose friends and family have long since died out; he learns that the box contained his old age. The more I learned, the more this explanation locked itself into my head -- Ezra Pound's interest in Japanese literature and his influence over Eliot; the connection between the Rip van Winkle aspect of this story and that of the Irish "Voyage of Brain", set in The Land of Women; the version of the Japanese legend in which Taro opens the box out of his longing to hear a human voice after living among the mute mermaids... It came as somewhat of a shock to me, then, when I casually brought this up in conversation and was met with blank stares from a number of quite well-read friends. Searching standard references and the internet I found absolutely no reference to this at all, and more curiously nothing elaborating on the mythological context for Eliot's mermaids. Can someone help me out here and fill me in on how the lines We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. are generally interpreted?

Posted By dan131m at Wed 16 Apr 2008, 12:00 AM in Eliot, T. S. || 0 Replies

Pink Floyd and T.S. ELiot

Hi, This is my first post. I'm doing a reasearch project and presentation on The Wasteland. There is SOOOO much information that I am having a really difficult time organizing it all!! I was wondering if anyone had ever done any research on Eliot's connection with Pink Floyd? There are several things about the Wateland, alone that remind me of Pink Floyd's music, and when I looked it up on the net, I found that Eliot actually wrote the preface to a book entitled "Dark Side of the Moon." Interesting, huh?

Posted By cole524 at Wed 5 Mar 2008, 1:47 PM in Eliot, T. S. || 7 Replies

Thesis help!

Alright...i have to write a 5 page research paper over a poem by T.S Eliot. I haven't been able to decide what poem I want to do it over, norm for that matter what my thesis is going to be! Could you guys help?:flare:

Posted By PacoPaco at Wed 20 Feb 2008, 11:47 PM in Eliot, T. S. || 11 Replies

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