T.S.
Eliot, the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the giants of modern literature, highly distinguished as a poet,
literary critic, dramatist, and editor and publisher. In 1910 and 1911, while still a college student, he wrote “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock” and other poems that are landmarks in the history of literature. In these college poems, Eliot articulated distinctly
modern themes in forms that were both a striking development of and a marked departure from those of 19th-century poetry.
Within a few years he had composed another landmark poem, “Gerontion” (1920), and within a decade, one of the most famous
and influential poems of the century, The Waste Land (1922). While the origins of The Waste Land are in part personal, the voices
projected are universal. Eliot later denied that he had large cultural problems in mind, but, nevertheless, in The Waste Land he
diagnosed the malaise of his generation and indeed of Western civilization in the 20th century. In 1930 he published his next major
poem, Ash-Wednesday, written after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. Conspicuously different in style and tone from his earlier
work, this confessional sequence charts his continued search for order in his personal life and in history. The culmination of this
search as well as of Eliot’s poetic writing is his meditation on time and history, the works known collectively as Four Quartets
(1943(sad) Burnt Norton (1941), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942).
Eliot was almost as renowned a literary critic as he was a poet. From 1916 through 1921 he contributed approximately one
hundred reviews and articles to various periodicals. This early criticism was produced at night under the pressure of supplementing
his meager salary—first as a teacher, then as a bank clerk—and not, as is sometimes suggested, under the compulsion to rewrite
literary history. A product of his critical intelligence and superb training in philosophy and literature, his essays, however hastily
written and for whatever motive, had an immediate impact. His ideas quickly solidified into doctrine and became, with the early
essays of I.A. Richards, the basis of the New Criticism, one of the most influential schools of literary study in the 20th century.
Through half a century of critical writing, Eliot’s concerns remained more or less constant; his position regarding those concerns,
however, was frequently refined, revised, or, occasionally, reversed. Beginning in the late 1920s, Eliot’s literary criticism was
supplemented by religious and social criticism. In these writings, such as The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), he can be seen as a
deeply involved and thoughtful Christian poet in the process of making sense of the world between the two World Wars. These
writings, sympathetically read, suggest the dilemma of the serious observer of Western culture in the 1930s, and rightly
understood, they complement his poetry, plays, and literary journalism. Eliot is also an important figure in 20th-century drama. He
was inclined from the first toward the theater-his early poems are essentially dramatic, and many of his early essays and reviews
are on drama or dramatists. By the mid 1920s he was writing a play, Sweeney Agonistes (published in 1932, performed in 1933); in
the 1930s he wrote an ecclesiastical pageant, The Rock (performed and published in 1934), and two full-blown plays, Murder in
the Cathedral (performed and published in 1935) and The Family Reunion (performed and published in 1939); and in the late
1940s and the 1950s he devoted himself almost exclusively to plays, of which The Cocktail Party (performed in 1949, published in
1950) has been the most popular. His goal, realized only in part, was the revitalization of poetic drama in terms that would be
consistent with the modern age. He experimented with language that, though close to contemporary speech, is essentially poetic
and thus capable of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual resonance. His work has influenced several important 20th-century
playwrights, including W.H. Auden and Harold Pinter. Eliot also made significant contributions as an editor and publisher. From
1922 to 1939 he was the editor of a major intellectual journal, The Criterion, and from 1925 to 1965 he was an editor/director in
the publishing house of Faber and Faber. In both capacities he worked behind the scenes to nurture the intellectual and spiritual
life of his times.
