THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT 1888 1965 Born in Saint

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT 1888 -1965

§Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, USA §Studied at Harvard, interest in Renaissance literature and South Asian religions §Studied literature in France and Germany before moving to England after the start of WWI in 1914 §Studied Greek philosophy at Oxford, worked at Lloyd’s bank § 1915 married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, an English writer (suffered from poor emotional and physical health) § 1921, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, went to Swiss sanitorium for two months §In Paris met Ezra Pound and gave him the manuscript of The Waste Land

§Left his wife in 1933 § 1943 remarried, to Valerie Fletcher §With Pound’s help, published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in Poetry magazine in 1915 § 1922 publication of The Waste Land in The Criterion in Britain and then in The Dial in America § 1925 joined publishing firm Faber & Gwyer § 1927 became a British citizen and joined the Church of England

„When he settled in London he saw poetry in English as exhausted, with no verbal excitement or original craftsmanship. He sought to make poetry more subtle, more suggestive, and at the same time more precise. ” –Norton Anthology, 2287

„…from Pound, he learned…to regard the poetic medium rather than the poet’s personality as the important factor…he saw in the Metaphysical poets how wit and passion could be combined, and he saw in the French symbolists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, how an image could be both absolutely precise in what it referred to physically and endlessly suggestive in its meanings because of its relationshp to other images. ” –Norton Anthology, 2287

„Eliot’s real novelty…was his deliberate elimination of all merely connective and transitional passages, his building up of the total pattern of meaning through the immediate juxtaposition of images without overt explanation of what they are doing, together with his use of oblique references to other works of literature…” Norton, 2288

„…what he was aiming at in his own poetry: the reestablishment of that unified sensibility he found in Donne and other early-seventeenth-century poets and dramatists, who were able, he suggests in ‚The Metaphyscial Poets, ’ to ‚feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. ” –Norton, 2289

„He considered himself a ‚classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo. Catholic in religion”, in favor of order against chaos, tradition against eccentricity, authority against rampant individualism. ” –Norton, 2289

„We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously…someone said: ‚The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did. ’ Precisely, and they are that which we know. ” –Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent 1919

„When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. ” –T. S. Eliot, The Metaphysical Poets

„We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. ” Eliot, The Metaphysical Poets

„Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act falls the Shadow. For Thine is the Kingdom. Between the conception and the creation, between the emotion and the response falls the Shadow. Life is very long. Between the desire and the spasm, between the potency and the existence, between the essence and the descent falls the Shadow. For Thine is the Kingdom. For Thine is. Life is. For Thine is the. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper. ” The Hollow Men 1925