Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and youngest child of a distinguished family of New England origin. His forebears included the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, founder of Washington University in St. Louis, and on his mother’s side, Isaac Stearns, one of the original settlers of Massachusetts Bay Colony. Eliot’s father was a prosperous industrialist and his mother wrote among others a biography of William Greenleaf Eliot.
Eliot was educated at Smith Academy in St. Louis, Milton Academy in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard, where he contributed poetry to Harvard Advocate. He spent a year in France, attending lectures at the Sorbonne. After Eliot returned to Harvard, he completed a dissertation on the English idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley, and studied Sanskrit and Buddhism.
In 1914 he moved in England and started to reform poetic diction with Ezra Pound, who was largely responsible for getting Eliot’s early poems into print—among them The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock in the Chicago magazine Poetry in 1915.
Pound also introduced Eliot to Harriet Weaver, who published Eliot’s first volume of verse, Prufrock And Other Observations, in 1917. Eliot taught for a year at Highgate Junior School in London, and then worked as a clerk at Lloyds Bank. A physical condition prevented his entering in 1918 the US Navy. In 1919 appeared Eliot’s second book, Ara Vos Prec (published in the U.S. as Poems), hand-printed by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogath Press.
In an early essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), Eliot propounded the doctrine that poetry should be impersonal and free itself from Romantic practices Eliot sees that in this depersonalization the art approaches science. With his collection of essays, The Sacred Wood (1920), and later published The Use Of Poetry And The Use Of Criticism (1933) and The Classics And The Man Of Letters (1942), Eliot established his reputation as a critic and had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste. In 1922 Eliot founded the Criterion, a quarterly review that he edited until he halted its publication at the beginning of World War II. In 1925 he joined the publishing house of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), becoming eventually one of the firm’s directors. Between the years 1917 and 1919 Eliot was an assistant editor of the journal the Egoist and from 1919 onward he was a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement.
In the 60 years from 1905 to his death, Eliot published some 600 articles and reviews.
Eliot’s first marriage from 1915 with the ballet-dancer Vivienne Haigh-Wood turned out to be unhappy. She was temperamental, from 1930 until her death in 1947 she was confined in mental institutions. Later Eliot married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher.
The appearance of The Waste Land (1922), a poetic exploration of soul’s—or civilization’s—struggle for regeneration, made Eliot world famous. Following Pound’s suggestion, Eliot reduced The Waste Land to about half its original length. The first version, with Pound’s revisions, was published in 1971. The long poem caught the mood of confusion after World War I, when everything in society seemed to be changing and and many felt that pre-war values were lost.
Divided into five sections, The Waste Land is a series of fragmentary dramatic monologues, a dense chorus of voices and culture historical quotations, that fade one into another. Moreover, Eliot didn’t hesitate to combine slang with scholarly language. The Waste Land ends ambiguously with a few words of Sanskrit. In a way the work fulfilled Eliot’s “impersonal theory of poetry”:
In 1927 Eliot became a British citizen and member of the Church of England. His pilgrimage towards his own particular brand of High Anglicanism may be charted in his poetry, starting from ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) to visions in Four Quartets (135-42), consisting of ‘Burnt Norton’, ‘East Cocer’, The Dry Salvages’, and ‘Little Gidding,’ into which he integrated his experiences in World War II as a watchman checking for fires during bombing raids. These quartets represent the four seasons and four elements. Eliot’s other works include poetic dramas, in which his dramatic verse became gradually indistinguishable from prose. Murder In The Cathedral (1935) was written for a church performance and treated the martyrdom of St. Thomas à Beckett. In The Family Reunion (1939) Eliot took a theme of contemporary life, and tried to find a rhythm close to contemporary speech. The Coctail Party (1950) was partly based on Alcestis of Euripides. Eliot took in it greater liberties with ordinary colloquial speech.
Eliot was an incurable joker and among his many pranks was to seat visiting authors in chairs with whoopee cushions and offer them exploding cigars. To the poet’s pleasure, the American comedian Groucho Marx was his great fan. Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats (1939), Eliot’s classical book of verse for children, has achieved a considerable world success in a musical adaptation. His most influential exercise in social criticism was Notes Toward A Definition Of Culture (1948).
