TS Eliot Biography

Short T.S. Eliot biography: Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American poet, dramatist, and literary critic whose works include "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," and the epic Four Quartets. Eliot was educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Merton College, Oxford, after being born in St. Louis, Missouri. He eventually made his home in England, where he converted to the Anglican Church and became a British citizen in 1927.

Eliot, like the fellow modernist poet and expatriate Ezra Pound, drew widely from the literary canon, crafting tough, uncompromising poetry to depict the contemporary era's complexity and disasters. Eliot wrote poems that echoed the grandeur of classical poetry while also expressing the agonising feelings of despair and desolation in the aftermath of two world wars—feelings that would become part of the spiritual landscape of Eliot's time—perhaps more than any other modernist.

Following Eliot's conversion to Christianity, the alienation that informed his early works would give place to more hopeful themes. To the chagrin of the literary establishment, Eliot declared himself a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion" in 1928. Eliot investigated the religious dimensions of time and redemption in his later writings and came to regard Christianity and European cultural tradition as vital solutions to the anomie he had explored in seminal works like The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. In 1948, T.S. Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In this article, we are going to discuss Thomas Stearns Eliot Biography in detail, majorly focusing on  T.S. Eliot’s Life and Work along with some notable T.S. Eliot Poems.

Information on T.S. Eliot biography

Birthdate: 26 September 1888
Birth Place: St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.
Death date: 4 January 1965
Death Place: London, England
Age: 76
Spouse: Vivienne Haigh-Wood ​(m. 1915; Sep. 1932)​
              Esmé Valerie Fletcher ​(m. 1957)
Citizenship: American (1888–1927)
                      British (1927–1965)

T.S. Eliot’s Life and Works

Eliot came from a well-known family in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919), was a wealthy businessman who served as president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis; his mother, Charlotte Chauncy Stearns (1843–1929), taught school and wrote poetry before marrying. His parents were both 44 years old when he was born, and he was their last kid. His four surviving sisters were eleven to nineteen years his senior, while his brother was eight years his junior.

Education

Eliot attended Smith Academy in St. Louis, a preparatory school for Washington University, from 1898 to 1905. Eliot studied Latin, Greek, French, and German at the academy. Although Eliot might have attended Harvard University after graduation, his parents sent him to Milton Academy in Milton, Massachusetts for a year of preparation. Scofield Thayer, who would eventually publish Eliot's most famous poem, The Waste Land, met him there. From 1906 to 1909, he attended Harvard University and received his B.A. Some of his poetry was published in the Harvard Advocate, and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken.

He received his master's degree from Harvard the following year. Eliot spent the 1910–1911 academic year in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and travelling across Europe. In 1911, Eliot returned to Harvard as a PhD student in philosophy, where he studied F.H. Bradley's works, Buddhism, and Indic philosophy (he also learned Sanskrit and Pli to read certain sacred manuscripts).

He was offered a scholarship to attend Oxford in 1914, but before settling there, he travelled to Marburg, Germany, for a summer programme in philosophy. However, when World War I broke out, he travelled to London and then Oxford right away. Eliot was dissatisfied at Merton and declined to return for a second year.

Early Career and Marriage

Eliot married in the summer of 1915, and after a brief journey to the United States to see his family, he began teaching. He continued to work on his dissertation, which he finished in the spring of 1916 and submitted to Harvard. While his thesis was accepted, he was not awarded a PhD because he did not present in-person to defend it. (The dissertation was published in 1964 as F. H. Bradley's Knowledge and Experience in Philosophy.) George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, Henri Bergson, C. R. Lanman, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim were among the world-famous philosophers Eliot studied with throughout his undergraduate years.

To supplement his income after leaving Oxford, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, published book reviews, and lectured at evening extension courses. He went to work for Lloyds Bank in London in 1917, where he worked on international accounts. He left Lloyds in 1925 to become a director of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), where he remained for the rest of his career.

Eliot became a British citizen and converted to Anglicanism in 1927. (on June 29). In 1933, Eliot divorced Vivienne, and in 1938, she was committed to Northumberland House, a mental institution north of London, where she died in 1947 without ever seeing her husband. Eliot's second marriage was lovely, although only lasted a few years. He married Esmé Valerie Fletcher on January 10, 1957. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot had known Valerie since August 1949, when she had been his secretary at Faber & Faber. The wedding, like his marriage to Vivienne, was kept a secret to protect his privacy. Her widowhood was spent protecting his legacy; she edited and annotated T.S. Eliot's Letters and a reproduction of The Waste Land's first manuscript.

Death

Eliot died of emphysema on January 4, 1965, in London. He suffered from health problems for many years as a result of the combination of London air and his heavy smoking. Eliot's corpse was burned, and the ashes were taken to St. Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from whence Eliot's forefathers moved to America, as per Eliot's desires. A tiny plaque honours him there. A massive stone monument to Eliot was put on the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey on the second anniversary of his death.

Literary Career And Influences

Throughout his career, Eliot composed only a few poems, but the ones he did write were of lasting value. With the exception of the melancholy early poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," he wrote very little in America that would ever be published. Most of his greatest poems would not be written until he had firmly established himself in Europe's Modernist milieu. Some have gone so far as to label Eliot as a European poet rather than an American poet, yet this difference cannot be made so casually.

As a writer, Eliot spent most of his time in London. After the war, he spent the 1920s in Paris's Montparnasse Quarter, where he was photographed by Man Ray and socialised with artists such as Pablo Picasso, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, William Carlos Williams, and Marcel Duchamp. Eliot's work was heavily influenced by French poetry, particularly that of Charles Baudelaire, whose stark depictions of Parisian society served as a model for Eliot's own depictions of London. Early in his life, he dabbled in Sanskrit and eastern religions.

Eliot's work began to veer significantly away from the libertine and free forms of his fellow modernists after his conversion to Christianity and the Church of England. Since his conversion, Eliot's poetry has been almost exclusively religious in nature, with an emphasis on preserving historical English and generally European ideals that he believed were critical in recovering from the cultural collapse of the early twentieth century.

Later in life, Eliot migrated away from the French symbolist poets who had affected his early compositions and toward the metaphysical poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell, prompted by his strong religious and conservative beliefs. Their clarity of image and metaphor, along with a very nuanced and tortured trust in the spirit, influenced Eliot's later religious epic poems—most notably the Four Quartets—which derive much of their set from the metaphysical writers' actual places of residence and writing.

Poetry

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Despite the fact that Prufrock appears to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote the majority of the poem when he was only 22 years old. Its now-famous opening lines, which compare the evening sky to "a patient etherized upon a table," were upsetting and unpleasant at a time when Georgian poetry was praised for its weak derivations of nineteenth-century Romantic authors. The poem then follows the conscious experience of a man, Prufrock, lamenting his physical and mental inertia, lost opportunities in his life, and lack of spiritual progress, with the recurring theme of carnal love unattained (relayed in the stream of consciousness form characteristic of the Modernists). Eliot's thorough reading of Dante Alighieri inspired the form of the poem (in Italian). The poem has references to Shakespeare's Hamlet and other literary works: In Eliot's following work, he extended this method of reference and citation.

The Waste Land

Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion in October 1922. The Waste Land was written amid a moment of personal turmoil for Eliot—his marriage was in trouble, and both he and Vivienne suffered from nervous disorders—and is commonly interpreted as a metaphor for the post-war generation's disillusionment. Eliot distanced himself from the poem's sense of despair even before it was published as a book (December 1922).

Despite the poem's alleged obscurity—its elegiac yet daunting ability to summon up a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literature; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time; its elegiac yet daunting ability to summon up a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literature—it has become a touchstone of modern literature, a poetic counterpart to James Joyce's Ulysses, which was published the same year. The poem, like Joyce's novel, is nearly impossible to summarise because it shifts between a variety of voices and narratives with absolutely little signal to the reader. Despite this inherent ambiguity, the poem has become a symbol of the perplexing times in which it was written.

Four Quartets

Despite the fact that many critics preferred his previous work, Eliot believed Four Quartets to be his masterpiece. His grasp of mysticism and philosophy is reflected in The Four Quartets. It is made up of four large poems, each in five portions, published separately: "Burnt Norton" (1936), "East Coker" (1940), "The Dry Salvages" (1941), and "Little Gidding" (1942). Each opens with a contemplation on the title's geographical location, and each meditates on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relationship to the human predicament. In addition, each is linked to one of the four classical elements: air, earth, water, or fire.

"Burnt Norton" ponders what it means to think about what could have been. We see the skeleton of an abandoned house, and Eliot toys with the concept that all of these "merely imaginable" realities are present but unseen: All of the different ways people can stroll across a courtyard add up to a massive dance that no one can see; youngsters who aren't there hiding in the bushes.

"East Coker" continues the exploration of time and meaning, focusing on the nature of language and poetry in a renowned passage. Eliot continues to reassert a solution in the midst of the darkness ("I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope").

The element of water is explored in "The Dry Salvages" through images of a river and the sea. It attempts to reconcile opposites once more ("...the past and future are overcome and reconciled").

The Quartet "Little Gidding" (the element of fire) is the most widely anthologized. The poem is inspired by Eliot's experiences as an air raid warden during the Blitz, and he imagines meeting Dante during the German bombing.

Preoccupations Of His Poetry

Eliot was one of the most well-known authors of the twentieth century, and his poetry address subjects like:

• The Christian faith and its associated cultural norms are continuing to diminish.

• Time passes us by (particularly evident in Preludes)

• Urban society's degeneration (shown through deliberately ugly imagery and personification)

• The ordinary needs of existence, the repetitious pattern of life, and the human condition in general limit human ambition.

• Modern life is characterised by endurance rather than pleasure, with uniformity and duplication taking the place of choice.