Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 18884 January 1965) was a poet, essayist and playwright.Bush, Ronald. "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career", in John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (eds), American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, via He was a leading figure of modernist poetry in the English language where he altered the art through his use of pessimistic language, writing style, and verse structure. Awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, he is considered one of the greatest poets of the English language. He is also noted for his critical essays, which often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there. He became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39 and renounced his American citizenship.
Eliot first attracted widespread attention for "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), which, at the time of its publication, was considered outlandish. (citing an unsigned review in Literary World. 5 July 1917, vol. lxxxiii, 107.) It was followed by The Waste Land (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1943)."Thomas Stearns Eliot", Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 7 November 2009. He wrote seven plays, including Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry"."The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 – T.S. Eliot", Nobel Foundation, taken from Frenz, Horst (ed). Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901–1967. Amsterdam: Elsevier Publishing Company, 1969. Retrieved 6 March 2012.
Life Early life and education The Eliots were a Boston Brahmin family with roots in England and New England. Eliot's paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, who wrote poetry, was a social worker, then a new profession in the US. Eliot was the last of six surviving children.
Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns. Eliot lived in St. Louis for the first 16 years of his life at the house on Locust Street where he was born. After going away to school in 1905, he returned to St. Louis only for holidays and visits. Despite moving away from the city, Eliot wrote to a friend that "Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world."
Eliot was drawn to literature in childhood. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in many physical activities. Often isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy immediately became obsessed with books, favouring tales of savage life, the Wild West, or Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. In his memoir about 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." 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."Letter to Marquis Childs quoted in St. Louis Post Dispatch (15 October 1930) and in the address "American Literature and the American Language" delivered at Washington 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), pg. 6.
From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, the boys college preparatory division of Washington University, where his studies included Ancient Greek, Latin, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was 14, under the influence of Edward FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them. 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. Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" in The Harvard Advocate. He published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". The last mentioned story reflected his exploration of the Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. His interest in indigenous peoples thus predated his anthropological studies at Harvard University.
Following graduation from Smith Academy, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer, who later published The Waste Land. He studied at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning a Bachelor of Arts in an elective programme similar to comparative literature in 1909 and a Master of Arts in English literature the following year. Because of his year at Milton Academy, Eliot was allowed to earn his Bachelor of Arts after three years instead of the usual four. 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 Corbière and his book Les amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot's life. The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken.
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 University of Paris. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Alain-Fournier. From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit.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. While a member of the Harvard Graduate School, Eliot fell in love with Emily Hale. Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. He first visited Marburg in the German Empire, where he planned to take a summer programme, but when the First World War broke out he went to the University of Oxford instead. At the time so many American students attended Merton that the Junior Common Room proposed 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.Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, Knopf Publishing Group, pg. 1
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." Leaving Oxford, Eliot spent much of his time in London. This city had a monumental and life-altering effect on Eliot for several reasons, the most significant of which was his introduction to the influential American poet 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 fledgling 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 Pound and "some of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared [...] It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere." In the end, Eliot did not settle at Merton and left after a year. In 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck College, University of London.
In 1916 he completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on "Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley", but failed to return for the viva voce examination.For a reading of the dissertation, see
Marriage
Before leaving the US, Eliot had told Emily Hale that he was in love with her. He exchanged letters with her from Oxford during 1914 and 1915, but they did not meet again until 1927. In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote: "I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society)."Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898–1922. p. 75. Less than four months later, Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess. They were married at Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915.Richardson, John, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters. Random House, 2001, p. 20.
After a short visit, alone, to his family in the United States, Eliot returned to London and took several teaching jobs. 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.Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. Knopf Publishing Group, 2001, p. 17.
The marriage seems to have been markedly unhappy, in part because of Vivienne's health problems. In a letter addressed to Ezra Pound, she covers an extensive list of her symptoms, which included a recurrent high temperature, fatigue, insomnia, migraines, and colitis. This, coupled with apparent mental instability, meant that she was often sent away by Eliot and her doctors for extended periods in the hope of improving her health. As time went on, he became increasingly detached from her. According to witnesses, both Eliots were frequent complainers of illness, physical and mental, while Eliot would drink excessively and Vivienne is said to have developed a liking for opium and ether, drugs prescribed for medical issues. It is claimed that the couple's wearying behaviour caused some visitors to vow never to spend another evening in the company of both together. The couple separated in 1932 and formally separated in 1933; in 1938 Vivienne's brother Maurice had her committed to a mental hospital against her will, where she remained until her death of heart disease in 1947. When told via a phone call from the asylum that Vivienne had died unexpectedly during the night, Eliot is said to have buried his face in his hands and cried out 'Oh God, oh God.'
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."Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898–1922. London: Faber & Faber. 1988. p. xvii.
Teaching, banking, and publishing