T. S.

Eliot
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For other people named Thomas Elliot, see Thomas Elliot (disambiguation).

T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot in 1934
Born

Thomas Stearns Eliot

26 September 1888
St. Louis, Missouri, United States

Died

4 January 1965 (aged 76)

Kensington, London, England

Occupation

Poet, dramatist, literary critic, and editor

Nationality

British

Citizenship

American by birth; British from 1927

Education

AB in philosophy

Alma mater

Merton College, Oxford

Harvard University

Sorbonne
Period

19051965

Literary
movement

Modernism

Notable works

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), The

Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets(1944)

Notable
awards

Nobel Prize in Literature (1948),Order of

Spouse

Vivienne Haigh-Wood

Merit (1948)

(m. 1915; sep. 1932)

Esm Valerie Fletcher
(m. 195765)

Signature

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 4 January 1965) was a British, American-born
essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one of the twentieth century's major
poets".[1] He immigrated to England in 1914 at age 25, settling, working and marrying there. He was
eventually naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39, renouncing his American citizenship.[2]
Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), which
is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known
poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash
Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945).[3] He is also known for his seven plays,
particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948,
"for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." [4][5]
Contents
[hide]

1Life
o

1.1Early life and education

1.2Marriage

1.3Teaching, Lloyds, Faber and Faber

1.4Conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship

1.5Separation and remarriage

1.6Death and honours

2Poetry
o

2.1The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

2.2The Waste Land

2.3The Hollow Men

2.4Ash-Wednesday

2.5Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

2.6Four Quartets

3Plays

4Literary criticism

5Critical reception

5.1Responses to his poetry

5.2Allegations of anti-Semitism

5.3Influence

5.4Awards

6Works
o

6.1Earliest works

6.2Poetry

6.3Plays

6.4Nonfiction

6.5Posthumous publications

6.6Critical editions

7Notes

8Further reading

9External links
o

9.1Biography

9.2Works

9.3Web sites

9.4Archives

9.5Miscellaneous

Life[edit]
Early life and education[edit]
The Eliots were a Boston family with roots in Old and New England. Thomas Eliot's paternal
grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri[3][6] to establish a Unitarian
Christian church there. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (18431919), was a successful businessman,
president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis; his mother, Charlotte
Champe Stearns (18431929), wrote poetry and was a social worker, a new profession in the early
twentieth century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children; his parents were both 44 years old
when he was born. His four sisters were between eleven and nineteen years older; his brother was
eight years older. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal
grandfather, Thomas Stearns.
Eliot's childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors. First, he had to
overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he
could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socialising with his
peers. As he was often isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the
young boy immediately became obsessed with books and was absorbed in tales depicting savages,
the Wild West, or Mark Twain's thrill-seeking Tom Sawyer.[7] In his memoir of Eliot, his friend Robert
Sencourt comments that the young Eliot "would often curl up in the window-seat behind an
enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living."[8] Secondly, Eliot credited his
hometown with fuelling his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply
than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's
childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider
myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London." [9] Thus,
from the onset, literature was an essential part of Eliot's childhood and both his disability and
location influenced him.
From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek,
French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was fourteen under the influence of Edward
Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. He said the
results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them.[10] His first published poem, "A Fable For
Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in
February 1905.[11] Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an
untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" inThe Harvard Advocate, Harvard University's
student magazine.[12] He also published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a

Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration
of Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis.[13][14][15] Such a link with primitive
people importantly antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard. [16]
Following graduation, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where
he met Scofield Thayer who would later publish The Waste Land. He studied philosophy at Harvard
College from 1906 to 1909, earning his bachelor's degree after three years, instead of the usual four.
[3]
While a student, Eliot was placed on academic probation and graduated with a pass degree (i.e.
no honours).[17] Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate
career was in 1908 when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot
wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbire and his book Les amours jaunes, a work that
affected the course of Eliot's life.[18] The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems and he
became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken the American novelist.
After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris, where
from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He attended lectures by Henri
Bergson and read poetry with Alain-Fournier.[3][18] From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard
studying Indian philosophy andSanskrit.[3][19] Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College,
Oxford in 1914. He first visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer program, but
when the First World War broke out, he went to Oxford instead. At the time so many American
students attended Merton that the Junior Common Roomproposed a motion "that this society abhors
the Americanization of Oxford". It was defeated by two votes, after Eliot reminded the students how
much they owed American culture.[20]
Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and university people,
who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous
pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead." [20] Escaping Oxford, Eliot
spent much of his time in London. This city had a monumental and life-altering effect on Eliot for
multiple reasons, the most significant of which was his introduction to the influential American literary
figure Ezra Pound. A connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on 22
September 1914, Eliot paid a visit to Pound's flat. Pound instantly deemed Eliot "worth watching"
and was crucial to Eliot's beginning career as a poet, as he is credited with promoting Eliot through
social events and literary gatherings. Thus, according to biographer John Worthen, during his time in
England Eliot "was seeing as little of Oxford as possible". He was instead spending long periods of
time in London, in the company of Ezra Pound and "some of the modern artists whom the war has
so far spared... It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere." [21] In the end, Eliot did
not settle at Merton, and left after a year. In 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck, University of
London.
By 1916, he had completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on Knowledge and Experience in the
Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, but he failed to return for the viva voce exam.[3][22]

Marriage[edit]

Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, passport photograph from 1920.

In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote, "I am very dependent upon women
(I mean female society)."[23] Less than four months later, Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivienne HaighWood, a Cambridge governess. They were married at Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915.
[24]

After a short visit alone to his family in the United States, Eliot returned to London and took several
teaching jobs, such as lecturing at Birkbeck College, University of London. The philosopher Bertrand
Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars have
suggested that she and Russell had an affair, but the allegations were never confirmed. [25]
The marriage was markedly unhappy, in part because of Vivienne's health issues. In a letter
addressed to Ezra Pound, she covers an extensive list of her symptoms, which included a habitually
high temperature, fatigue, insomnia, migraines, andcolitis.[26] This, coupled with apparent mental
instability, meant that she was often sent away by Eliot and her doctors for extended periods of time
in the hope of improving her health, and as time went on, he became increasingly detached from
her. The couple formally separated in 1933 and in 1938 Vivienne's brother, Maurice, had her
committed to a lunatic asylum, against her will, where she remained until her death of heart disease
in 1947. Their relationship became the subject of a 1984 play Tom & Viv, which in 1994 was adapted
as a film.
In a private paper written in his sixties, Eliot confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love
with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England.
And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of [Ezra] Pound) that she would save the poet
by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of
mind out of which came The Waste Land."[27]

Teaching, Lloyds, Faber and Faber[edit]

A plaque atSOAS's Faber Building, 24 Russell Square, London

After leaving Merton, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably at Highgate School, a private
school in London, where he taught French and Latinhis students included the young John
Betjeman.[3] Later he taught at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, a state school
in Buckinghamshire. To earn extra money, he wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension
courses. In 1917, he took a position atLloyds Bank in London, working on foreign accounts. On a trip
to Paris in August 1920 with the artist Wyndham Lewis, he met the writerJames Joyce. Eliot said he
found Joyce arrogantJoyce doubted Eliot's ability as a poet at the timebut the two soon became
friends, with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever he was in Paris.[28] Eliot and Wyndham Lewis also
maintained a close friendship, leading to Lewis's later making his well-known portrait painting of Eliot
in 1938.
Charles Whibley recommended T.S. Eliot to Geoffrey Faber.[29] In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds to join the
publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, laterFaber and Faber, where he remained for the rest of his
career, eventually becoming a director. At Faber and Faber, he was responsible for publishing
important English poets like W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Ted Hughes.[30]

Conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship[edit]

The Faber and Faber building where Eliot worked from 1925 to 1965; the commemorative plaque is under the
right-hand arch.

On 29 June 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism from Unitarianism, and in November that year he
took British citizenship. He became a warden of his parish church, Saint Stephen's, Gloucester
Road, London, and a life member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr.[31][32] He specifically
identified as Anglo-Catholic, proclaiming himself "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglocatholic [sic] in religion".[33][34] About thirty years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he
combined "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament". [35] He also
had wider spiritual interests, commenting that "I see the path of progress for modern man in his

occupation with his own self, with his inner being" and citing Goethe and Rudolf Steiner as
exemplars of such a direction.[36]
One of Eliot's biographers, Peter Ackroyd, commented that "the purposes of [Eliot's conversion] were
two-fold. One: the Church of England offered Eliot some hope for himself, and I think Eliot needed
some resting place. But secondly, it attached Eliot to the English community and English culture." [30]

Separation and remarriage[edit]

By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. When Harvard
offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 19321933 academic year, he accepted
and left Vivienne in England. Upon his return, he arranged for a formal separation from her, avoiding
all but one meeting with her between his leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947.
Vivienne was committed to the Northumberland House mental hospital, Stoke Newington, in 1938,
and remained there until she died. Although Eliot was still legally her husband, he never visited her.[37]
[38]

From 1938 to 1957 Eliot's public companion was Mary Trevelyan of London University, who wanted
to marry him and left a detailed memoir.[39][40][41]
From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat with his friend John Davy Hayward, who collected and
managed Eliot's papers, styling himself "Keeper of the Eliot Archive".[42] Hayward also collected Eliot's
pre-Prufrock verse, commercially published after Eliot's death as Poems Written in Early Youth.
When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of
Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge, in 1965.
On 10 January 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot married Esm Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. In contrast
to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and
Faber since August 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ceremony was held in a church at
6:15 am with virtually no one in attendance other than his wife's parents. Eliot had no children with
either of his wives. In the early 1960s, by then in failing health, Eliot worked as an editor for
theWesleyan University Press, seeking new poets in Europe for publication. After Eliot's death,
Valerie dedicated her time to preserving his legacy, by editing and annotating The Letters of T. S.
Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land.[43] Valerie Eliot died on 9 November 2012 at her
home in London.[44]

Death and honours[edit]

Blue plaque, 3 Kensington Court Gardens, Kensington, London, home from 1957 until his death in 1965

For many years Eliot had suffered from lung-related health problems
including bronchitis and tachycardia caused by heavy smoking.[citation needed] He died of emphysema at his
home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated at Golders Green
Crematorium. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken to St Michael and All Angels'

Church, East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors had emigrated to
America. A wall plaque commemorates him with a quotation from his poem "East Coker", "In my
beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning."
In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, Eliot was commemorated by the installation of a
large stone in the floor ofPoets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey. The stone, cut by
designer Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates, his Order of Merit, and a quotation from his
poem "Little Gidding", "the communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of
the living."[45]
The house where he died, No. 3 Kensington Court Gardens, has had a blue plaque on it since 1986.
[46]

Poetry[edit]
For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small number of poems. He was aware of this
even early in his career. He wrote to J.H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My
reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three
more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so
that each should be an event."[47]
Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small books or pamphlets,
and then collected them in books. His first collection was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). In
1920, he published more poems in Ara Vos Prec (London) and Poems: 1920 (New York). These had
the same poems (in a different order) except that "Ode" in the British edition was replaced with
"Hysteria" in the American edition. In 1925, he collected The Waste Land and the poems
inPrufrock and Poems into one volume and added The Hollow Men to form Poems: 19091925.
From then on, he updated this work as Collected Poems. Exceptions are Old Possum's Book of
Practical Cats (1939), a collection of light verse; Poems Written in Early Youth, posthumously
published in 1967 and consisting mainly of poems published between 1907 and 1910 in The
Harvard Advocate, and Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 19091917, material Eliot never
intended to have published, which appeared posthumously in 1997. [48]
During an interview in 1959, Eliot said of his nationality and its role in his work: "I'd say that my
poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with
anything written in my generation in England. That I'm sure of. ... It wouldn't be what it is, and I
imagine it wouldn't be so good; putting it as modestly as I can, it wouldn't be what it is if I'd been born
in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its
sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America."[49]
It must also be acknowledged, as Chinmoy Guha showed in his book Where the Dreams Cross: T S
Eliot and French Poetry (Macmillan, 2011), that he was deeply influenced by French poets from
Baudelaire to Paul Valry. He himself wrote in his 1940 essay on W.B. Yeats: "The kind of poetry that
I needed to teach me the use of my own voice did not exist in English at all; it was only to be found
in French." (On Poetry and Poets, 1948)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock[edit]

Main article: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended to Harriet Monroe, the
magazine's founder, that she publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Although the character
Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only twenty-two. Its
now-famous opening lines, comparing the evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table", were
considered shocking and offensive, especially at a time when Georgian Poetry was hailed for its
derivations of the nineteenth century Romantic Poets.

The poem follows the conscious experience of a man, Prufrock (relayed in the "stream of
consciousness" form characteristic of the Modernists), lamenting his physical and intellectual inertia
with the recurrent theme of carnal love unattained. Critical opinion is divided as to whether the
narrator leaves his residence during the course of the narration. The locations described can be
interpreted either as actual physical experiences, mental recollections, or as symbolic images from
the unconscious mind, as, for example, in the refrain "In the room the women come and go".
The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante and refers to a
number of literary works, including Hamlet and those of the French Symbolists. Its reception in
London can be gauged from an unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement on 21 June
1917. "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest
importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry."[50]

The Waste Land[edit]

T. S. Eliot in 1923 by Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Main article: The Waste Land

In October 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion. Eliot's dedication to il miglior
fabbro ("the better craftsman") refers to Ezra Pound's significant hand in editing and reshaping the
poem from a longer Eliot manuscript to the shortened version that appears in publication. [51]
It was composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliothis marriage was failing, and both he
and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders. The poem is often read as a representation of
the disillusionment of the post-war generation. Before the poem's publication as a book in December
1922, Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair. On 15 November 1922, he wrote to Richard
Aldington, saying, "As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I
am now feeling toward a new form and style."[52]
The poem is known for its obscure natureits slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt
changes of speaker, location, and time. This structural complexity is one of the reasons that the
poem has become a touchstone of modern literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the
same year, James Joyce's Ulysses.[53]
Among its best-known phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of
dust" and "Shantih shantih shantih". The Sanskrit mantra ends the poem.

The Hollow Men[edit]

Main articles: The Hollow Men and The Hollow Men in popular culture

The Hollow Men appeared in 1925. For the critic Edmund Wilson, it marked "The nadir of the phase
of despair and desolation given such effective expression inThe Waste Land."[54] It is Eliot's major
poem of the late 1920s. Similar to Eliot's other works, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary.
Post-war Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised), the difficulty of hope and
religious conversion, Eliot's failed marriage.[55]
Allen Tate perceived a shift in Eliot's method, writing that, "The mythologies disappear altogether
in The Hollow Men." This is a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante as anything else in
Eliot's early work, to say little of the modern English mythologythe "Old Guy Fawkes" of the
Gunpowder Plotor the colonial andagrarian mythos of Joseph Conrad and James George Frazer,
which, at least for reasons of textual history, echo in The Waste Land.[56] The "continuous parallel
between contemporaneity and antiquity" that is so characteristic of his mythical method remained in
fine form.[57] The Hollow Men contains some of Eliot's most famous lines, notably its conclusion:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Ash-Wednesday[edit]
Main article: Ash Wednesday (poem)
Ash-Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism.
Published in 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith acquires it.
Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals
with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. Eliot's style of
writing in Ash-Wednesday showed a marked shift from the poetry he had written prior to his 1927
conversion, and his post-conversion style would continue in a similar vein. His style was to become
less ironic, and the poems would no longer be populated by multiple characters in dialogue. His
subject matter would also become more focused on Eliot's spiritual concerns and his Christian faith.
Many critics were particularly enthusiastic about Ash-Wednesday. Edwin Muir maintained that it is
one of the most moving poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect", though it was not well
received by everyone. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of the
more secular literati.[3][58]

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats[edit]

Main article: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
In 1939, Eliot published a book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats ("Old Possum"
was Ezra Pound's nickname for him). This first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover.
In 1954, the composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems for speaker and orchestra in a work
entitled Practical Cats. After Eliot's death, the book was adapted as the basis of the
musical Cats by Andrew Lloyd Webber, first produced in London's West End in 1981 and opening
onBroadway the following year.

Four Quartets[edit]
Main article: Four Quartets
Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that led to his being awarded
the Nobel Prize in Literature.[3] It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt
Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942). Each has five
sections. Although they resist easy characterisation, each poem includes meditations on the nature
of time in some important respecttheological, historical, physicaland its relation to the human
condition. Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements: air, earth, water, and fire.
Burnt Norton is a meditative poem that begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present
moment while walking through a garden, focusing on images and sounds like the bird, the roses,
clouds, and an empty pool. The narrator's meditation leads him/her to reach "the still point" in which

he doesn't try to get anywhere or to experience place and/or time, instead experiencing "a grace of
sense". In the final section, the narrator contemplates the arts ("Words" and "music") as they relate
to time. The narrator focuses particularly on the poet's art of manipulating "Words [which] strain, /
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden [of time], under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay
with imprecision, [and] will not stay in place, / Will not stay still." By comparison, the narrator
concludes that "Love is itself unmoving, / Only the cause and end of movement, / Timeless, and
undesiring."
East Coker continues the examination of time and meaning, focusing in a famous passage on the
nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution: "I said to my soul, be still, and
wait without hope."
The Dry Salvages treats the element of water, via images of river and sea. It strives to contain
opposites: "The past and future / Are conquered, and reconciled."
Little Gidding (the element of fire) is the most anthologised of the Quartets. Eliot's experiences as an
air raid warden in The Blitz power the poem, and he imagines meeting Dante during the German
bombing. The beginning of the Quartets ("Houses / Are removed, destroyed") had become a violent
everyday experience; this creates an animation, where for the first time he talks of Love as the
driving force behind all experience. From this background, the Quartets end with an affirmation
of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well and / All manner of thing shall be well."
The Four Quartets cannot be understood without reference to Christian thought, traditions, and
history. Eliot draws upon the theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, and
mystics St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich. The "deeper communion" sought in East Coker,
the "hints and whispers of children, the sickness that must grow worse in order to find healing", and
the exploration which inevitably leads us home all point to the pilgrim's path along the road
of sanctification.

Plays[edit]
Main articles: Sweeney Agonistes, Murder in the Cathedral, The Rock (play), The Family
Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman
With the important exception of Four Quartets, Eliot directed much of his creative energies after Ash
Wednesday to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was
long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions
to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in The Waste Land. In a
1933 lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social
utility . . . . He would like to be something of a popular entertainer, and be able to think his own
thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only
to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in
which to do it."[59]
After The Waste Land (1922), he wrote that he was "now feeling toward a new form and style". One
project he had in mind was writing a play in verse, using some of the rhythms of early jazz. The play
featured "Sweeney", a character who had appeared in a number of his poems. Although Eliot did not
finish the play, he did publish two scenes from the piece. These scenes, titled Fragment of a
Prologue (1926) and Fragment of an Agon (1927), were published together in 1932 asSweeney
Agonistes. Although Eliot noted that this was not intended to be a one-act play, it is sometimes
performed as one.[11]
A pageant play by Eliot called The Rock was performed in 1934 for the benefit of churches in
the Diocese of London. Much of it was a collaborative effort; Eliot accepted credit only for the
authorship of one scene and the choruses.[11] George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had been
instrumental in connecting Eliot with producer E. Martin Browne for the production of The Rock, and
later commissioned Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This one, Murder

in the Cathedral, concerning the death of the martyr, Thomas Becket, was more under Eliot's control.
Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd comments that "for [Eliot],Murder in the Cathedral and succeeding
verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to practice poetry but it also offered a
convenient home for his religious sensibility."[30] After this, he worked on more "commercial" plays for
more general audiences: The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential
Clerk, (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958) (the latter three were produced by Henry Sherek and
directed by E. Martin Browne[60]). The Broadway production in New York of The Cocktail
Party received the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. Eliot wrote The Cocktail Party while he was a
visiting scholar at theInstitute for Advanced Study.[61][62]
Regarding his method of playwriting, Eliot explained, "If I set out to write a play, I start by an act of
choice. I settle upon a particular emotional situation, out of which characters and a plot will emerge.
And then lines of poetry may come into being: not from the original impulse but from a secondary
stimulation of the unconscious mind."[30]

Literary criticism[edit]
Eliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism, strongly influencing the
school of New Criticism. While somewhat self-deprecating and minimising of his workhe once said
his criticism was merely a "by-product" of his "private poetry-workshop"Eliot is considered by some
to be one of the greatest literary critics of the twentieth century.[63] The critic William Empson once
said, "I do not know for certain how much of my own mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is
a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating
influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind."[64]
In his critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot argues that art must be understood not
in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. "In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ...
must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past."[63] This essay was an important influence
over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the
context of the artist's previous works, a "simultaneous order" of works (i.e., "tradition"). Eliot himself
employed this concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poem The Waste Land.[65]
Also important to New Criticism was the ideaas articulated in Eliot's essay "Hamlet and His
Problems"of an "objective correlative", which posits a connection among the words of the text and
events, states of mind, and experiences.[66] This notion concedes that a poem means what it says,
but suggests that there can be a non-subjective judgment based on different readers' differentbut
perhaps corollaryinterpretations of a work.
More generally, New Critics took a cue from Eliot in regard to his "'classical' ideals and his religious
thought; his attention to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century; his deprecation of
the Romantics, especially Shelley; his proposition that good poems constitute 'not a turning loose of
emotion but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence that 'poets... at present must be difficult'." [67]
Eliot's essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. Eliot
particularly praised the metaphysical poets' ability to show experience as both psychological and
sensual, while at the same time infusing this portrayal within Eliot's viewwit and uniqueness.
Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets", along with giving new significance and attention to
metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of "unified sensibility", which is
considered by some to mean the same thing as the term "metaphysical". [68][69]
His 1922 poem The Waste Land[70] also can be better understood in light of his work as a critic. He
had argued that a poet must write "programmatic criticism", that is, a poet should write to advance
his own interests rather than to advance "historical scholarship". Viewed from Eliot's critical
lens, The Waste Land likely shows his personal despair about World War I rather than an objective
historical understanding of it.[71]

Late in his career, Eliot focused much of his creative energy on writing for the theatre, and some of
his critical writing, in essays like "Poetry and Drama," "Hamlet and his Problems," and "The
Possibility of a Poetic Drama," focused on the aesthetics of writing drama in verse.

Critical reception[edit]
Responses to his poetry[edit]
The writer Ronald Bush notes that Eliot's early poems like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock",
"Portrait of a Lady", "La Figlia Che Piange", "Preludes", and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" had "[an]
effect [that] was both unique and compelling, and their assurance staggered [Eliot's] contemporaries
who were privileged to read them in manuscript. [Conrad] Aiken, for example, marveled at 'how
sharp and complete and sui generis the whole thing was, from the outset. The wholeness is there,
from the very beginning.'"[72]
The initial critical response to Eliot's "The Waste Land" was mixed. Ronald Bush notes that the piece
was at first correctly perceived as a work of jazz-like syncopationand, like 1920s jazz, essentially
iconoclastic."[72] Some critics, like Edmund Wilson, Conrad Aiken, and Gilbert Seldes thought it was
the best poetry being written in the English language while others thought it was esoteric and wilfully
difficult. Edmund Wilson, being one of the critics who praised Eliot, called him "one of our only
authentic poets".[73] Wilson also pointed out some of Eliot's weaknesses as a poet. In regard to "The
Waste Land", Wilson admits its flaws ("its lack of structural unity"), but concluded, "I doubt whether
there is a single other poem of equal length by a contemporary American which displays so high and
so varied a mastery of English verse."[73]
Charles Powell was negative in his criticism of Eliot, calling his poems incomprehensible. [74] And the
writers of Time magazine were similarly baffled by a challenging poem like "The Waste Land".
[75]
John Crowe Ransom wrote negative criticisms of Eliot's work but also had positive things to say.
For instance, though Ransom negatively criticised "The Waste Land" for its "extreme disconnection",
Ransom was not completely condemnatory of Eliot's work and admitted that Eliot was a talented
poet.[76]
Addressing some of the common criticisms directed against "The Waste Land" at the time, Gilbert
Seldes stated, "It seems at first sight remarkably disconnected and confused... [however] a closer
view of the poem does more than illuminate the difficulties; it reveals the hidden form of the work,
[and] indicates how each thing falls into place."[77]
Following the publication of The Four Quartets, Eliot's reputation as a poet, as well as his influence
in the academy, was at its peak. In an essay on Eliot published in 1989, the writer Cynthia
Ozick refers to this peak of influence (from the 1940s through the early 1960s) as "the Age of Eliot"
when Eliot "seemed pure zenith, a colossus, nothing less than a permanent luminary, fixed in the
firmament like the sun and the moon".[78] But during this post-war period, others, like Ronald Bush,
observed that this time also marked the beginning of the decline in Eliot's literary influence:
As Eliot's conservative religious and political convictions began to seem less congenial in the
postwar world, other readers reacted with suspicion to his assertions of authority, obvious in Four
Quartets and implicit in the earlier poetry. The result, fueled by intermittent rediscovery of Eliot's
occasional anti-Semitic rhetoric, has been a progressive downward revision of his once towering
reputation.[72]
Bush also notes that Eliot's reputation "slipped" significantly further after his death. He writes,
"Sometimes regarded as too academic (William Carlos Williams's view), Eliot was also frequently
criticized for a deadening neoclassicism (as he himselfperhaps just as unfairlyhad
criticized Milton). However, the multifarious tributes from practicing poets of many schools published
during his centenary in 1988 was a strong indication of the intimidating continued presence of his
poetic voice."[72]

Although Eliot's poetry is not as influential as it once was, notable literary scholars, like Harold
Bloom[79] and Stephen Greenblatt,[80] still acknowledge that Eliot's poetry is central to the literary
English canon. For instance, the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature write, "There
is no disagreement on [Eliot's] importance as one of the great renovators of the English poetry
dialect, whose influence on a whole generation of poets, critics, and intellectuals generally was
enormous. [However] his range as a poet [was] limited, and his interest in the great middle ground of
human experience (as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner) [was] deficient." Despite this
criticism, these scholars also acknowledge "[Eliot's] poetic cunning, his fine craftsmanship, his
original accent, his historical and representative importance as the poet of the modern symbolistMetaphysical tradition".[81]

Allegations of anti-Semitism[edit]
The depiction of Jews in some of Eliot's poems has led several critics to accuse him of antiSemitism. This case has been presented most forcefully in a study byAnthony Julius: T. S. Eliot,
Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996).[82][83] In "Gerontion", Eliot writes, in the voice of the poem's
elderly narrator, "And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner [of my building] / Spawned in
some estaminet of Antwerp."[84] Another well-known example appears in the poem, "Burbank with a
Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar". In this poem, Eliot wrote, "The rats are underneath the piles. / The
jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs."[85] Interpreting the line as an indirect comparison of Jews
to rats, Julius writes, "The anti-Semitism is unmistakable. It reaches out like a clear signal to the
reader." Julius's viewpoint has been supported by literary critics such as Harold Bloom,
[86]
Christopher Ricks,[87] George Steiner,[87] Tom Paulin[88] and James Fenton.[87]
In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933, published under the title After
Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934), Eliot wrote of societal tradition and coherence,
"What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and
reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews
undesirable."[89] Eliot never re-published this book/lecture.[87] In his 1934 pageant play The Rock, Eliot
distances himself from Fascist movements of the thirties by caricaturing Oswald Mosley's
Blackshirts, who 'firmly refuse/ To descend to palaver with anthropoid Jews'. [90] The 'new
evangels'[91] of totalitarianism are presented as antithetic to the spirit of Christianity.
Craig Raine, in his books In Defence of T. S. Eliot (2001) and T. S. Eliot (2006), sought to defend
Eliot from the charge of anti-Semitism. Reviewing the 2006 book, Paul Dean stated that he was not
convinced by Raine's argument. Nevertheless, he concluded, "Ultimately, as both Raine and, to do
him justice, Julius insist, however much Eliot may have been compromised as a person, as we all
are in our several ways, his greatness as a poet remains." [87] In another review of Raine's 2006 book,
the literary critic Terry Eagleton also questioned the validity of Raine's defence of Eliot's character
flaws as well as the entire basis for Raine's book, writing, "Why do critics feel a need to defend the
authors they write on, like doting parents deaf to all criticism of their obnoxious children? Eliot's wellearned reputation [as a poet] is established beyond all doubt, and making him out to be as unflawed
as the Archangel Gabriel does him no favours."[92]

Influence[edit]
Eliot's influence extends beyond the English language. His work, in particular The Waste Land, The
Hollow Men, and Ash Wednesday strongly influenced the poetry of two of the most significant postWar Irish language poets, Sen Rordin and Mirtn Drein, as well as The Weekend of
Dermot and Grace (1964) byEoghan O Tuairisc.[93] Eliot additionally influenced, among many
others, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, William Gaddis, Allen Tate, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey
Hill, Seamus Heaney, Kamau Brathwaite,[94] Russell Kirk,[95] George Seferis (who in 1936 published a
modern Greek translation of The Waste Land,) and James Joyce[dubious discuss] .[96]

Awards[edit]

Order of Merit (awarded by King George VI (United Kingdom),

1948)[97]

Nobel Prize in Literature "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to

present-day poetry" (Stockholm, 1948)[5]

Officier de la Legion d'Honneur (1951)

Hanseatic Goethe Prize (Hamburg, 1955)

Dante Medal (Florence, 1959)

Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1960)

Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964)

Thirteen honorary doctorates (including Oxford, Cambridge, the

Sorbonne, and Harvard)

Tony Award in 1950 for Best Play: The Broadway production of The
Cocktail Party

Two posthumous Tony Awards (1983) for his poems used in the
musical Cats

Eliot College of the University of Kent, England, named after him

Celebrated on commemorative postage stamps

A star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame

Works[edit]
Main article: T. S. Eliot bibliography

Earliest works[edit]

Prose

"The Birds of Prey" (a short story; 1905)[98]

"A Tale of a Whale" (a short story; 1905)

"The Man Who Was King" (a short story; 1905)[99]

[A review of] "The Wine and the Puritans" (1909)

"The Point of View" (1909)

"Gentlemen and Seamen" (1909)

[A review of] "Egoist" (1909)

Poems

"A Fable for Feasters" (1905)

"[A Lyric:]'If Time and Space as Sages say'" (1905)

"[At Graduation 1905]" (1905)

"Song:'If space and time,as sages say'" (1907)

"Before Morning" (1908)

"Circe's Palace" (1908)

"Song: 'When we came home across the hill'" (1909)

"On a Portrait" (1909)

"Nocturne" (1909)

"Humoresque" (1910)

"Spleen" (1910)

"[Class]Ode" (1910)

Poetry[edit]

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Portrait of a Lady (poem)

Preludes

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Morning at the Window

The Boston Evening Transcript (about the Boston Evening Transcript)

Aunt Helen

Cousin Nancy

Mr. Apollinax, a sketch of Bertrand Russell[100]

Hysteria

Cnnversation Galante

La Figlia Che Piange

Poems (1920)

Gerontion

Sweeney Among the Nightingales

"The Hippopotamus"

"Whispers of Immortality"

"Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service"

"A Cooking Egg"

The Waste Land (1922)

The Hollow Men (1925)

Ariel Poems (19271954)

Journey of the Magi (1927)

A Song for Simeon (1928)

Ash Wednesday (1930)

Coriolan (1931)

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs and Billy M'Caw: The Remarkable
Parrot(1939) in The Queen's Book of the Red Cross

Four Quartets (1945)

Sweeney Agonistes (published in 1926, first performed in 1934)

The Rock (1934)

Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

Plays[edit]

The Family Reunion (1939)

The Cocktail Party (1949)

The Confidential Clerk (1953)

The Elder Statesman (first performed in 1958, published in 1959)

Christianity & Culture (1939, 1948)

The Second-Order Mind (1920)

Tradition and the Individual Talent (1920)

The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920)

Nonfiction[edit]

"Hamlet and His Problems"

Homage to John Dryden (1924)

Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1928)

For Lancelot Andrewes (1928)

Dante (1929)

Selected Essays, 19171932 (1932)

The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)

After Strange Gods (1934)

Elizabethan Essays (1934)

Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)

The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)

A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941) made by Eliot, with an essay

on Rudyard Kipling, London, Faber and Faber.

Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948)

Poetry and Drama (1951)

The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)

The Frontiers of Criticism (1956)

On Poetry and Poets (1957)

Posthumous publications[edit]

To Criticize the Critic (1965)

The Waste Land: Facsimile Edition (1974)

Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 19091917 (1996)

Collected Poems, 19091962 (1963) excerpt and text search

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Illustrated

Edition (1982) excerpt and text search

Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot edited by Frank Kermode

(1975) excerpt and text search

The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions) edited by Michael North

(2000) excerpt and text search

Selected essays (1932); enlarged (1960)

The letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton,

Volume 1: 18981922 (1988)

The letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton,

Volume 2: 19231925 (2009)

The letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton,

Volume 3: 19261927 (2012)

The letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden,

Volume 4: 19281929 (2013)

The letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden,

Volume 5: 19301931 (2014)

Critical editions[edit]

Notes[edit]
1.

Jump up^ Bush, Ronald. "T.S. Eliot's Life and Career." American
National Biography. Ed. John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999.[1]

2.

Jump up^ Bloom, Harold (2003). T.S. Eliot. Bloom's Biocritiques.

Broomall: Chelsea House Publishing. p. 30.

3.

^ Jump up to:a b c d e f g h i Thomas Stearns Eliot, Encyclopaedia

Britannica, accessed 7 November 2009.

4.

Jump up^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948". Nobelprize.org. Nobel

Media. Retrieved26 April 2013.

5.

^ Jump up to:a b "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 T.S. Eliot",

Nobelprize.org, taken from Frenz, Horst (ed). Nobel Lectures,
Literature 19011967. Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam,
1969, accessed 6 March 2012.

6.

Jump up^ Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot: the modernist in history, (New
York, 1991), p. 72

7.

Jump up^ Worthen, John (2009). T.S. Eliot: A Short Biography.

London: Haus Publishing. p. 9.

8.

Jump up^ Sencourt, Robert (1971). T.S. Eliot, A Memoir. London:

Garnstone Limited. p. 18.

9.

Jump up^ Letter to Marquis Childs quoted in St. Louis Post

Dispatch (15 October 1930) and in the address "American Literature
and the American Language" delivered atWashington University in St.
Louis (9 June 1953), published in Washington University Studies, New
Series: Literature and Language, no. 23 (St. Louis: Washington
University Press, 1953), p. 6.

10. Jump up^ Hall, Donald. The Art of Poetry No. 1, The Paris Review,
Issue 21, SpringSummer 1959, accessed 29 November 2011.
11. ^ Jump up to:a b c Gallup, Donald. T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (A Revised
and Extended Edition), Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1969.
12. Jump up^ Eliot, T.S. Poems Written in Early Youth, John Davy
Hayward, ed. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1967
13. Jump up^ Narita, Tatsushi, "The Young T. S. Eliot and Alien Cultures:
His Philippine Interactions", The Review of English Studies, New
Series, vol. 45, no. 180, 1994, pp. 523525.
14. Jump up^ Narita, Tatsush, T. S. Eliot, The World Fair of St. Louis and
"Autonomy", Nagoya: Kougaku Shuppan (2013), pp.9104.
15. Jump up^ Bush, Ronald, "The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic
Thinking/ Literary Politics", in Prehistories of the Future, ed. Elzar
Barkan and Ronald Bush, Stanford University Press,(1995), pp. 35;
2531.
16. Jump up^ Marsh, Alex and Elizabeth Daumer, "Pound and T. S.
Eliot", American Literary Scholarship, 2005, 182.
17. Jump up^ [2]
18. ^ Jump up to:a b Kermode, Frank. "Introduction" to The Waste Land
and Other Poems, Penguin Classics, 2003.

19. Jump up^ Perl, Jeffry M. and Andrew P. Tuck. "The Hidden Advantage
of Tradition: On the Significance of T. S. Eliot's Indic
Studies", Philosophy East & West V. 35 No. 2, April 1985, pp. 116
131.
20. ^ Jump up to:a b Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: The Life of
Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, Knopf Publishing Group, p. 1.
21. Jump up^ Worthen, John (2009). T.S. Eliot: A Short Biography.
London: Haus Publishing. pp. 3436.
22. Jump up^ For a reading of the dissertation, see Brazeal, Gregory
(Fall 2007). "The Alleged Pragmatism of T.S. Eliot". Philosophy &
Literature 31 (1): 248264. Retrieved17 January 2011.
23. Jump up^ Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, 18981922.
p. 75.
24. Jump up^ Richardson, John, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters.
Random House, 2001, p. 20.
25. Jump up^ Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of
Vivienne Eliot. Knopf Publishing Group, 2001, p. 17.
26. Jump up^ The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume 1, 18981922. London:
Faber and Faber. 1988. p. 533.
27. Jump up^ Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898
1922. London: Faber and Faber. 1988. p. xvii.
28. Jump up^ Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. pp. 492495
29. Jump up^ Kojecky, Roger (1972). T. S. Eliot's Social Criticism. Faber
& Faber. p. 55.ISBN 0571096921.
30. ^ Jump up to:a b c d T.S. Eliot. Voices and Visions Series. New York
Center of Visual History: PBS, 1988.[3]
31. Jump up^ plaque on interior wall of Saint Stephen's
32. Jump up^ obituary notice in Church and King, Vol. XVII, No. 4, 28
February 1965, p. 3.
33. Jump up^ Specific quote is "The general point of view [of the essays]
may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and
anglo-catholic [sic] in religion", in preface by T.S. Eliot to For Lancelot
Andrewes: essays on style and order, (1929)
34. Jump up^ Books: Royalist, Classicist, Anglo-Catholic, 25 May
1936, Time
35. Jump up^ Eliot, T.S. (1986). On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber &
Faber. p. 209.ISBN 0571089836.

36. Jump up^ Radio interview on 26 September

1959, Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk, as cited inWilson, Colin
(1988). Beyond the Occult. London: Bantam Press. pp. 335336.
37. Jump up^ Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of
Vivienne Eliot. Constable 2001, p. 561.
38. Jump up^ "Vivienne suffered terribly each month from what we now
would recognize as PMS.""A Tribute to Dr. Katharina Dalton".
Retrieved 11 July 2014.
39. Jump up^ Ronald Bush T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History 1991
Page 11 "Mary Trevelyan, then aged forty, was less important for
Eliot's writing. Where Emily Hale and Vivienne were part of Eliot's
private phantasmagoria, Mary Trevelyan played her part in what was
essentially a public friendship. She was Eliot's escort for nearly twenty
years until his second marriage in 1957. A brainy woman, with the
bracing organizational energy of a Florence Nightingale, she propped
the outer structure of Eliot's life, but for him she, too, represented .."
40. Jump up^ Leon Surette The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T.S.
Eliot, and Humanism2008 Page 343 "Later, sensible, efficient Mary
Trevelyan served her long stint as support during the years of
penitence. For her their friendship was a commitment; for Eliot quite
peripheral. His passion for immortality was so commanding that it
allowed him to ..."
41. Jump up^ Santwana Haldar T.S. Eliot A Twenty-first Century
View 2005 Page xv "Details of Eliot's friendship with Emily Hale, who
was very close to him in his Boston days and with Mary Trevelyan,
who wanted to marry him and left a riveting memoir of Eliot's most
inscrutable years of fame, shed new light on this period in ..."
42. Jump up^ Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. Norton 1998,
p. 455.
43. Jump up^ Gordon, Jane. The University of Verse, The New York
Times, 16 October 2005; Wesleyan University Press timeline, 1957
44. Jump up^ Lawless, Jill (11 November 2012). "T.S. Eliot's widow
Valerie Eliot dies at 86".Associated Press via Yahoo News.
Retrieved 12 November 2012.
45. Jump up^ http://www.tabathayeatts.com/Poets%20Corner.jpg
46. Jump up^ "T. S. Eliot Blue Plaque". openplaques.org. Retrieved 23
November 2013.
47. Jump up^ Eliot, T. S. "Letter to J. H. Woods, April 21, 1919." The
Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. I. Valerie Eliot, ed. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1988, p. 285.
48. Jump up^ "''T. S. Eliot: The Harvard Advocate Poems''. Retrieved 5
February 2007". Theworld.com. Retrieved 3 August 2009.

49. Jump up^ Hall, Donald (SpringSummer 1959). "The Art of Poetry
No. 1" (PDF). The Paris Review. Retrieved 7 November 2009.
50. Jump up^ Waugh, Arthur. The New Poetry, Quarterly Review,
October 1916, citing theTimes Literary Supplement 21 June 1917, no.
805, 299; Wagner, Erica (2001) "An eruption of fury", The Guardian,
letters to the editor, 4 September 2001. Wagner omits the word "very"
from the quote.
51. Jump up^ Miller, James H., Jr. (2005). T. S. Eliot: the making of an
American poet, 18881922. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State
University Press. pp. 387388.ISBN 0-271-02681-2.
52. Jump up^ The letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1, p. 596
53. Jump up^ MacCabe, Colin. T. S. Eliot. Tavistock: Northcote House,
2006.
54. Jump up^ Wilson, Edmund. "Review of Ash Wednesday", New
Republic, 20 August 1930.
55. Jump up^ See, for instance, the biographically oriented work of one
of Eliot's editors and major critics, Ronald Schuchard.
56. Jump up^ Grant, Michael (ed.). T. S. Eliot: the Critical Heritage.
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
57. Jump up^ " 'Ulysses', Order, and Myth", Selected Essays T. S. Eliot
(orig 1923).
58. Jump up^ Untermeyer, Louis. Modern American Poetry. Hartcourt
Brace, 1950, pp. 395396.
59. Jump up^ Eliot, T. S. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism,
Harvard University Press, 1933 (penultimate paragraph)
60. Jump up^ Darlington, W. A. (2004). "Henry Sherek". Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press.
Retrieved 27 July 2014.
61. Jump up^ T. S. Eliot at the Institute for Advanced Study The Institute
Letter, Spring 2007
62. Jump up^ Eliot, Thomas Stearns IAS profile
63. ^ Jump up to:a b "Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot, T. S. 1920.
''The Sacred Wood''". Bartleby.com. Retrieved 3 August 2009.
64. Jump up^ quoted in Roger Kimball, "A Craving for Reality", The New
Criterion Vol. 18, 1999
65. Jump up^ Dirk Weidmann: And I Tiresias have foresuffered all....
In: LITERATURA 51 (3), 2009, pp.98108.

66. Jump up^ "Hamlet and His Problems. Eliot, T. S. 1920. ''The Sacred
Wood''". Bartleby.com. Retrieved 3 August 2009.
67. Jump up^ Burt, Steven and Lewin, Jennifer. "Poetry and the New
Criticism". A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry, Neil Roberts,
ed. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. p. 154
68. Jump up^ "Project MUSE". Muse.jhu.edu. Retrieved 3 August 2009.
69. Jump up^ A. E. Malloch, "The Unified Sensibility and Metaphysical
Poetry", College English, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Nov. 1953), pp. 95101
70. Jump up^ "Eliot, T. S. 1922. ''The Waste Land''". Bartleby.com.
Retrieved 3 August 2009.
71. Jump up^ "T. S. Eliot :: The Waste Land and criticism ''Britannica
Online Encyclopedia''". Britannica.com. 4 January 1965. Retrieved 3
August 2009.
72. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Bush, Ronald. "T.S. Eliot". American National
Biography. Ed. John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999.[4].
73. ^ Jump up to:a b Wilson, Edmund. "The Poetry of Drouth". The Dial 73.
December 1922. 611-16.
74. Jump up^ Powell, Charles. "So Much Waste Paper". Manchester
Guardian. 31 October 1923.
75. Jump up^ Time. 3 March 1923, 12.
76. Jump up^ Ransom, John Crowe. "Waste Lands". New York Evening
Post Literary Review. 14 July 1923. 825-26.
77. Jump up^ Seldes, Gilbert. "T. S. Eliot". Nation. 6 December 1922.
614616.
78. Jump up^ Ozick, Cynthia. T.S. Eliot at 100. The New Yorker:
November 20, 1989
79. Jump up^ Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: Books and Schools of
the Ages. NY: Riverhead, 1995.
80. Jump up^ Eds. Stephen Greenblatt, et al. The Norton Anthology of
English Literature, Volume 2. "T.S. Eliot". W.W. Norton & Co.: NY, NY,
2000.
81. Jump up^ The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 2. "T.S.
Eliot". W.W. Norton & Co.: NY, NY, 2000.
82. Jump up^ Gross, John. Was T.S. Eliot a Scoundrel?, Commentary
magazine, November 1996

83. Jump up^ Anthony, Julius. T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary
Form. Cambridge University Press, 1996 ISBN 0-521-58673-9
84. Jump up^ Eliot, T.S. "Gerontion". Collected Poems. Harcourt, 1963.
85. Jump up^ Eliot, T.S. "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a
Cigar". Collected Poems. Harcourt, 1963.
86. Jump up^ Bloom, Harold (7 May 2010). "The Jewish Question: British
Anti-Semitism". The New York Times. Retrieved 9 April 2012.
87. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e Dean, Paul (April 2007). "Academimic: on Craig
Raine's T.S. Eliot". The New Criterion. Retrieved 7 June 2011.
88. Jump up^ London Review of Books, 9 May 1996 [5]
89. Jump up^ Kirk, Russell. "T. S. Eliot on Literary Morals: On T. S.
Eliot's After Strange Gods", Touchstone Magazine, volume 10, issue 4,
Fall 1997.
90. Jump up^ T.S. Eliot, The Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 44.
91. Jump up^ The Rock, 44
92. Jump up^ Eagleton, Terry. "Raine's Sterile Thunder". The Prospect
Magazine. 22 March 2007.[6]
93. Jump up^ Irish Poetry
94. Jump up^ [Brathwaite, Kamau, "History of the Voice", Roots, Ann
Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1993, p. 286.]
95. Jump up^ T.S. Eliot
96. Jump up^ When Joyce met TS Eliot
97. Jump up^ "Poet T.S. Eliot Dies in London". This Day in History.
Retrieved 16 February2012.
98. Jump up^ The three short stories published in the Smith Academy
Record (1905) have never been recollected in any form and have
virtually been neglected.
99. Jump up^ As for a comparative study of this short story and Rudyard
Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King", see Tatsushi Narita, T. S.
Eliot and his Youth as "A Literary Columbus" (Nagoya: Kougaku
Shuppan, 2011), 2130.
100. Jump up^ Mittal, C. R. (2001). Eliot's Early Poetry in Perspective.
New Delhi: Atlantic.

Further reading[edit]

Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. (1984)

Ali, Ahmed. Mr. Eliot's Penny World of Dreams: An Essay in the

Interpretation of T.S. Eliot's Poetry, Published for the Lucknow University
by New Book Co., Bombay, P.S. King & Staples Ltd., Westminster, London,
1942, pages 138.

Asher, Kenneth T. S. Eliot and Ideology (1995)

Bottum, Joseph, "What T. S. Eliot Almost Believed", First Things 55

(August/September 1995): 2530.

Brand, Clinton A. "The Voice of This Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T. S.

Eliot",Modern Age Volume 45, Number 4; Fall 2003 online edition,
conservative perspective

Brown, Alec. The Lyrical Impulse in Eliot's Poetry, Scrutinies vol. 2.

Bush, Ronald. T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. (1984)

Bush, Ronald, 'The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/ Literary

Politics'. InPrehistories of the Future, ed. Elzar Barkan and Ronald Bush,
Stanford University Press. (1995).

Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot.
(1987).

---. Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste Land. (2015)

Christensen, Karen. "Dear Mrs. Eliot", The Guardian Review. (29 January
2005).

Dawson, J.L., P.D. Holland & D.J. McKitterick, A Concordance to 'The

Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot'. Ithaca & London: Cornell
University Press, 1995.

Forster, E. M. Essay on T. S. Eliot, in Life and Letters, June 1929.

Gardner, Helen. The Art of T. S. Eliot. (1949)

Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. (1998)

Guha, Chinmoy. Where the Dreams Cross: T. S. Eliot and French Poetry.
(2000, 2011)

Harding, W. D. T. S. Eliot, 19251935, Scrutiny, September 1936: A

Review.

Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot.

University Press of Mississippi (1978).

---. T. S. Eliot's Parisian Year. University Press of Florida (2009).

Julius, Anthony. T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Cambridge

University Press (1995)

Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. (1969)

---, editor, T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall. (1962)

Kirk, Russell Eliot and His Age: T. S, Eliot's Moral Imagination in the
Twentieth Century. (Introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr.).
Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Republication of the revised
second edition, 2008.

Kojecky, Roger. T.S. Eliot's Social Criticism, Faber & Faber, Farrar,
Strauss, Giroux, 1972, revised Kindle edn. 2014.

Lal, P. (Editor), T. S. Eliot: Homage from India: A Commemoration Volume

of 55 Essays & Elegies, Writer's Workshop Calcutta, 1965.

The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Ed. by Valerie Eliot. Vol. I, 18981922. San Diego
[etc.] 1988. Vol. 2, 19231925. Edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton,
London, Faber, 2009. ISBN 978-0-571-14081-7

Levy, William Turner and Victor Scherle. Affectionately, T. S. Eliot: The

Story of a Friendship: 19471965. (1968).

Matthews, T. S. Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot.

(1973)

Maxwell, D. E. S. The Poetry of T. S. Eliot, Routledge and Keagan Paul.

(1960).

Miller, James E., Jr. T. S. Eliot. The Making of an American Poet, 1888
1922. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005.

North, Michael (ed.) The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions). New
York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

Raine, Craig. T. S. Eliot. Oxford University Press (2006).

Ricks, Christopher.T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. (1988).

Robinson, Ian "The English Prophets", The Brynmill Press Ltd (2001)

Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. (1999).

Scofield, Dr. Martin, "T.S. Eliot: The Poems", Cambridge University Press.
(1988).

Seferis, George. "Introduction to T. S. Eliot" in Modernism/modernity 16:1

([7]January 2009), 14660.

Sencourt, Robert. T. S. Eliot: A Memoir. (1971)

Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. (2001).

Sinha, Arun Kumar and Vikram, Kumar. T. S. Eliot: An Intensive Study of

Selected Poems, Spectrum Books Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi, (2005).

Troy Southgate. Eliot: Thoughts & Perspectives, Volume Seven, Black

Front Press, 2012.

Spender, Stephen. T. S. Eliot. (1975)

Spurr, Barry, Anglo-Catholic in Religion: T. S. Eliot and Christianity, The

Lutterworth Press (2009)

Tate, Allen, editor. T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, First published in
1966 republished by Penguin 1971.

External links[edit]
Find more about
T. S. Eliot
at Wikipedia's sister projects

Media from Commons

Quotations from Wikiquote

Source texts from Wikisource

Biography[edit]

Works[edit]

Biography From T. S. Eliot Lives' and Legacies

Eliot family genealogy, including T. S. Eliot

Eliot's grave

T. S. Eliot's biographic sketch at Find A Grave

Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years, Oxford University Press, Oxford

and New York, 1977, ISBN 978-0-19-812078-0.

doollee.com listing of T S Eliot's works written for the stage

Works by T. S. Eliot at Project Gutenberg

Works by or about T. S. Eliot at Internet Archive

Works by T. S. Eliot at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

Poems by T.S. Eliot and biography at PoetryFoundation.org

Text of early poems (19071910) printed in the Harvard Advocate

T. S. Eliot Collection at Bartleby.com

T. S. Eliot Society (UK) Resource Hub

T. S. Eliot Hypertext Project

What the Thunder Said: T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber

T. S. Eliot Society (US) Home Page

Archival material relating to T. S. Eliot listed at the UK National

Archives

Search for T.S. Eliot at Harvard University

T. S. Eliot Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University

of Texas at Austin

T. S. Eliot Collection at Merton College, Oxford University

T.S. Eliot collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections

Links to audio recordings of Eliot reading his work

An interview with Eliot: Donald Hall (SpringSummer 1959). "T. S.

Eliot, The Art of Poetry No. 1". Paris Review.

Yale College Lecture on T.S. Eliot audio, video and full transcripts
from Open Yale Courses

Web sites[edit]

Archives[edit]

Miscellaneous[edit]

[hide]

T. S. Eliot

Bibliography

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Portrait of a Lady
"Preludes"
"Whispers of Immortality"
Gerontion
Early poems

The Waste Land

The Hollow Men
Ash Wednesday
Ariel Poems
Journey of the Magi
A Song for Simeon
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats
"Bustopher Jones"
"Gus: The Theatre Cat"
"Growltiger's Last Stand"

Later poems

Burnt Norton
East Coker
The Dry Salvages
Little Gidding
Four Quartets

Plays

Sweeney Agonistes
The Rock
Murder in the Cathedral
The Family Reunion
The Cocktail Party
The Confidential Clerk

The Elder Statesman

Selected Essays, 1917-1932
"Hamlet and His Problems"
Prose

"Tradition and the Individual Talent"

The Sacred Wood
"The Frontiers of Criticism"

Adaptations

CATS (1981 musical, 1998 film)

The Criterion

Publishing

Faber and Faber

T. S. Eliot Prize
T. S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University)

Related

Tom & Viv (1994 film)

Eliot family
Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot (first wife)
Valerie Eliot (second wife)
Henry Ware Eliot (father)
Charlotte Champe Stearns (mother)

People

William Greenleaf Eliot (grandfather)

E. Martin Browne
John Davy Hayward
Ezra Pound
Jean Jules Verdenal
William Butler Yeats

Commons

Wikibooks

Wikiquote
Wikisource texts
[show]

Laureates of the Nobel Prize in Literature

[show]

Andrew Lloyd Webber and T. S. Eliot's Cats

[show]

Tony Award for Best Original Score (19762000)

[show]

Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical (19762000)

WorldCat
VIAF: 56609282
LCCN: n79006870
ISNI: 0000 0001 2133 9888
GND: 118529854
SELIBR: 184982
SUDOC: 027288595
BNF:cb11901665b (data)

Authority control

ULAN: 500218769
MusicBrainz: ae90c453-e8ed-4fb7-9d27-35b81fd0fdac
NLA: 36143450
NDL: 00438797
NKC:jn19990002039
BNE: XX837336
CiNii: DA00354626

Categories:

T. S. Eliot

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