Eliot, Thomas Stearns - Life

Thomas Stearns Eliot - life

Eliot has something in common with Eugenio Montale.
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (another important american writer), broke down with georgian traditions, they definitely broke down with romanticism and they introduced a new kind of poetry, that is a kind of psychological poetry. In
their poems, they wanted to describe the psychological complexity and the spiritual avidity of the modern man.
T.S. Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He studied at Harvard university, where he had an important educational experience, this because when he was in Harvard, he studied european culture, so he came in contact
with french symbolists, but also with italian writers, in particular with Dante, in fact he admired Dante a lot. Then, he moved to Europe, first to Paris where he studied at the Sorbonne (here he followed important lessons held by an important philosopher, Henri Bergson). Thomas Stearns Eliot introduced also a new attitude to the idea of time, this because he was strongly influenced by Bergson's theories of time. There was an important distinction between the time of the mind and the time of the clock. The time of the mind is different from the time of the clock: our mind doesn't take into consideration the actual time, because in our mind there is past, present and future all together. For this reason the time of the mind is longer. When there was the breaking out of the first world war, T.S. Eliot was in London and because of his financial
problems, he was in a condition of working, so he started to work as a clerk at Lloyds Bank, then as a director. In London he also married a british dancer, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, but she had mental problems. So, immediately after the marriage, T.S. Eliot suffered a lot because of this reason. So, due to this reason, he spent some time in Swiss, in a kind of sanatorium, where he underwent psychological treatment. This was a terrible episode. Then, he became a british citizen, and at the same time, in the same year (1927), he decided something important in his life, he decided to be converted, he embraced the anglican church of England, and in this way, he found out all the answers he was looking for. For this reason, his life changed immediately, because before his religious conversion, his life was in a terrible condition of psychological crises, and it is not a case that his masterpiece "The waste land" was written just in that period (before the conversion). After the conversion, he had a different approach to life and he became a little bit optimistic.
In 1946, he divorced from his wife, and when his wife died, he felt terribly guilty for her death. Then, he had a great interest, that was that of the theater, and he also wrote a lot of plays at the end of his life. In
1948, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Then, he died in London in 1965.