T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
At the time when he was regarded as America’s most eminent living poet, T.S. Eliot announced that he was a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” In 1927, Eliot gave up his U.S. citizenship and became a subject of the king of England. The same year he was received into the Church of England. By a kind of poetic justice, this loss to America was later to be made up for: W.H. Auden, the leading British poet of his time, became a naturalized American citizen in 1946. But residence in an adopted country does not necessarily change the philosophy or the style of a poet. Eliot continued to speak in a voice first heard in the Puritan pulpits of Massachusetts. Auden retained a British sense of language unaffected by the inroads of American speech.
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s family was rooted in New England, though he was born in St. Louis, Missouri, where his grandfather had been a founder and chancellor of Washington University. Eliot’s childhood awareness of his native city would show itself in his poetry, but only after he had moved far away from St. Louis. He graduated from Harvard and went on to do postgraduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Just before the outbreak of World War I, Eliot took up residence in London, the city that would become his home for the rest of his life. There he worked for a time in a bank, suffered a nervous breakdown, married an emotionally troubled Englishwoman, and finally took up the business of literature. He became active as a publisher in the outstanding firm of Faber and Faber and, on his own, edited The Criterion, a literary magazine. As a critic he was responsible for reviving interest in many neglected poets, notably the seventeenth-century English poet John Donne.
Complex Poetry for a Complex World
Long before he decided to live abroad permanently, Eliot had developed a taste for classical literature. He was as familiar with European and Eastern writings as he was with the masterpieces of English. But the most crucial influence on his early work came from the late nineteenth-century French poets who, as a group, came to be known as the symbolists. When he was nineteen, Eliot came upon a book by the British critic Arthur Symons titled The Symbolist Movement in Literature. “I myself owe Mr. Symons a great debt,” wrote Eliot. “But for having read his book, I should not … have heard of Laforgue and Rimbaud; I should probably not have begun to read Verlaine; and but for reading Verlaine, I should not have heard of Corbiere. So the Symons book is one of those which have affected the course of life.”
The poets Eliot mentions were men of distinctly different talents. Yet they all believed in poetry as an art of suggestion rather than statement. They saw poetry as an art of recreating states of mind and feeling, as opposed to reporting or confessing them. These beliefs became the basis of Eliot’s own poetic methods. When people complained that this poetic method of suggestion was complex and difficult to understand, Eliot retorted that poetry had to be complex to express the complexities of modern life. More or less ignoring the still undervalued contribution of Walt Whitman, Eliot and other American poets also believed that, divorced from British antecedents, they would once and for all bring the rhythms of their native speech into the mainstream of world literature. Eliot and these other poets are often referred to as modernists.
Words for a Wasteland
Eliot had an austere view of poetic creativity; he disagreed with those who regarded a poem as a means of self-expression, as a source of comfort, or as a kind of spiritual pep talk. Practicing what he preached, Eliot startled his contemporaries with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915 and “Portrait of a Lady” in 1917. Then, in 1922, with the editorial advice and encouragement of poet Ezra Pound, Eliot published The Waste Land, a long work considered the most significant poem of the early twentieth century. The poem describes a civilization that is spiritually empty and paralyzed by indecision.
Assembled in the manner of a painter’s collage or a moviemaker’s montage, The Waste Land proved that it is possible to write an epic poem of classical scope in the space of 434 lines. Critics pored over the poems’ complex structure and its dense network of allusions to world literature, Eastern religions, and anthropology. A few years after The Waste Land appeared, Eliot published a series of notes identifying many of his key references. (He was dismayed to find that some of his more ardent admirers were more interested in the notes than in the poem itself.)
In 1925, Eliot published a kind of lyrical postscript to The Waste Land called “The Hollow Men,” which predicted in its somber conclusion that the world would end not with a bag but with a whimper. In “The Hollow Men,” Eliot repeats and expands some of the themes of his longer poem and arrives at the point of despair beyond which lie but two alternatives; renewal or annihilation.
A Submission to Peace
For critics surveying Eliot’s career, it has become commonplace to say that, after the spiritual dead end of “The Hollow Men,” Eliot chose hope over despair and faith over the world-weary cynicism that marked his early years. But there is such evidence in his later poems to indicate that, for Eliot, hope and faith were not conscious choices. Instead, they were the consequences of a submission, even a surrender, to that “peace which passeth understanding,” referred to in the last line of The Waste Land.
Eliot spent the remainder of his poetic career in an extended meditation on the limits of individual will and the limitless power of faith in the presence of grace.
Cited for his work as a pioneer of modern poetry, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1948. In the decades that followed, he came frequently to the United States to lecture and to read his poems, sometimes to audiences so large that he had to appear in football stadiums. Some of those who fought to buy tickets on the fifty-yard line were probably unaware of the irony in all of this commotion: that a man once regarded as the most difficult and obscure poet of his era had achieved the drawing power of a rock star.
Ezra Pound (who called Eliot “Possum”) wrote a few final words on the death of his old friend, ending with this passage:
“Am I to write ‘about’ the poet Thomas Stearns Eliot? Or my friend ‘the Possum’? Let him rest in peace, I can only repeat, but with the urgency of fifty years ago: READ HIM.”