Thomas
Stearns Eliot, or T.S. Eliot as he is better known, was born in 1888 in St. Louis. He was the son of a prominent
industrialist who came from a well- connected Boston family. Eliot always felt
the loss of his family’s New England roots and seemed to be somewhat ashamed of
his father’s business success; throughout his life he continually sought to
return to the epicenter of Anglo- Saxon culture, first by attending Harvard and
then by emigrating to England, where he lived from 1914
until his death. Eliot began graduate study in philosophy at Harvard and
completed his dissertation, although the outbreak of World War I prevented him
from taking his examinations and receiving the degree. By that time, though,
Eliot had already written “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and the War,
which kept him in England, led him to decide to pursue poetry full-time.
Eliot
met Ezra Pound in 1914, as well, and it was Pound
who was his main mentor and editor and who got his poems published and noticed.
During a 1921 break from his job as a bank clerk
(to recover from a mental breakdown), Eliot finished the work that was to
secure him fame, The Waste Land. This poem, heavily edited by Pound and
perhaps also by Eliot’s wife, Vivien, addressed the fragmentation and
alienation characteristic of modern culture, making use of these fragments to
create a new kind of poetry. It was also around this time that Eliot began to
write criticism, partly in an effort to explain his own methods. In 1925, he went to work for the publishing house Faber
& Faber. Despite the distraction of his wife’s increasingly serious bouts
of mental illness, Eliot was from this time until his death the preeminent
literary figure in the English-speaking world; indeed, he was so monumental
that younger poets often went out of their way to avoid his looming shadow,
painstakingly avoiding all similarities of style.
Eliot
attributed a great deal of his early style to the French Symbolists—Rimbaud,
Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Laforgue—whom he first encountered in college, in a
book by Arthur Symons called The Symbolist Movement in Literature. It is
easy to understand why a young aspiring poet would want to imitate these
glamorous bohemian figures, but their ultimate effect on his poetry is perhaps
less profound than he claimed. While he took from them their ability to infuse
poetry with high intellectualism while maintaining a sensuousness of language,
Eliot also developed a great deal that was new and original. His early works,
like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land, draw on a
wide range of cultural reference to depict a modern world that is in ruins yet
somehow beautiful and deeply meaningful. Eliot uses techniques like pastiche
and juxtaposition to make his points without having to argue them explicitly.
As Ezra Pound once famously said, Eliot truly did “modernize himself.” In
addition to showcasing a variety of poetic innovations, Eliot’s early poetry
also develops a series of characters who fit the type of the modern man as
described by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others of Eliot’s contemporaries. The
title character of “Prufrock” is a perfect example: solitary, neurasthenic,
overly intellectual, and utterly incapable of expressing himself to the outside
world.
As
Eliot grew older, and particularly after he converted to Christianity, his
poetry changed. The later poems emphasize depth of analysis over breadth of
allusion; they simultaneously become more hopeful in tone: Thus, a work such as
Four Quartets explores more philosophical territory and offers
propositions instead of nihilism. The experiences of living in England during
World War II inform the Quartets, which address issues of time,
experience, mortality, and art. Rather than lamenting the ruin of modern
culture and seeking redemption in the cultural past, as The Waste Land
does, the quartets offer ways around human limits through art and spirituality.
The pastiche of the earlier works is replaced by philosophy and logic, and the
formal experiments of his early years are put aside in favor of a new language
consciousness, which emphasizes the sounds and other physical properties of
words to create musical, dramatic, and other subtle effects.
Like
many modernist writers, Eliot wanted his poetry to express the fragile
psychological state of humanity in the twentieth century. The passing of
Victorian ideals and the trauma of World War I challenged cultural notions of
masculine identity, causing artists to question the romantic literary ideal of a
visionary-poet capable of changing the world through verse. Modernist writers
wanted to capture their transformed world, which they perceived as fractured,
alienated, and denigrated. Europe lost an entire generation of young men to the
horrors of the so-called Great War, causing a general crisis of masculinity as
survivors struggled to find their place in a radically altered society. As for
England, the aftershocks of World War I directly contributed to the dissolution
of the British Empire. Eliot saw society as paralyzed and wounded, and he
imagined that culture was crumbling and dissolving. “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” (1917) demonstrates this sense of
indecisive paralysis as the titular speaker wonders whether he should eat a
piece of fruit, make a radical change, or if he has the fortitude to keep
living. Humanity’s collectively damaged psyche prevented people from
communicating with one another, an idea that Eliot explored in many works,
including “A Game of Chess” (the second part of The Waste Land) and “The
Hollow Men.”