T. S. Eliot


Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 - January 4, 1965), was
an American poet, dramatist, and literary critic.

Eliot was born into a prominent Unitarian Saint Louis, Missouri family; the
famous Chancellor of Washington University Tom Eliot was a 5th cousin.
Eliot's major work shows few signs of St. Louis, but there was, in his
youth, a Prufrock furniture store in town.

But T.S. Eliot made his life and literary career in Great Britain, following
the curtailment of a tour of Germany by the outbreak of World War I. After
the War, in the 1920s, he would spend time with other great artists in the
Montparnasse Quarter in Paris, France where he would be photographed by Man
Ray. He dabbled in Buddhism and studied Sanskrit and was a student of G. I. Gurdjieff.

Through the influence of Ezra Pound he came to prominence with the
publication of a poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, in 1915. His
style was fresh and modernist.

In 1922, the publication of The Waste Land became one of the principal
examples of the new wave of poetry of the time. The Waste Land came to
represent the disillusionment of the post-World War I generation. Some
regard the poem's distinctive reliance on allusion, particularly to Greek
and Latin mythological figures, and its inclusion of German and French
phrases, as weaknesses which exclude the "average" reader, yet the poem
remains one of Eliot's most-read works. Ezra Pound, to whom the poem is
dedicated ("For Ezra Poud, Il miglior fabbro") contributed greatly to this
work with suggestions and counseling.

His later work, following his conversion to Anglicanism on June 29, 1927, is
often but by no means exclusively religious in nature. This includes such
works as The Hollow Men, Ash-Wednesday, The Journey of the Magi, and Four
Quartets. Eliot considered Four Quartets to be his masterpiece, as it draws
upon his vast knowledge of mysticism and philosophy. It consists of four
poems, "Burnt Norton," "The Dry Salvages," "East Coker," and "Little
Gidding." Each of these runs to several hundred lines total and is broken
into five stanzas. Although they resist easy characterization, they have
many things in common: Each begins with a rumination of the geographical
location of its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in some
important respect--theological, historical, physical, and on its relation to
the human condition. A reflective early reading suggests an inexact
systematicity among them; they approach the same ideas in varying but
overlapping ways, although they do not necesarily exhaust their questions.

"Burnt Norton" asks what it means to consider things that aren't the case
but might have been. We see the shell of an abandoned house, and Eliot toys
with the idea that all these "merely possible" realities are present
together, but invisible to us: All the possible ways people might walk
across a courtyard add up to a vast dance we can't see; Children who aren't
there are hiding in the bushes.

Eliot's plays, mostly in verse, include Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The
Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk
(1953) and The Elder Statesman ((1958).

Murder in the Cathedral is a frankly religious piece about the death of St
Thomas Becket. He confessed to being influenced by, among others, the works
of 17th century preacher, Lancelot Andrewes. Later, he was appointed to the
committee formed to produce the "New English" translation of the Bible.

On November 4, 1948, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, while at
the same time his friend Ezra Pound was being held in an asylum for the
mentally insane.

Later, his 1939 children's book of poetry, Old Possum's Book of Practical
Cats, was the basis of the hit West End and Broadway musical by Andrew Lloyd
Webber, Cats.

After his death, his body was cremated and, according to Eliot's wishes, the
ashes taken to St Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from which
that Eliot's ancestors emigrated to America. A simple plaque commemorates him.

As a note of trivia, late in his life, Eliot became somewhat of a penpal
with comedian Groucho Marx. Eliot even requested a portrait of the comedian,
which he then proudly displayed in his home.

The "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" is a greatly quoted and referenced
piece. References have appeared in Hill Street Blues and The Long Goodbye by
private-eye novelist Raymond Chandler.