Thomas Sterne Eliot

T.S. Eliot was a famous poet, literary critic, and playwright. He was one of the pioneers of modernism, a

movement in art and literature that was popular in America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth

century.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Henry Ware Eliot, a

businessman, and Charlotte Champe Stearns, a schoolteacher and amateur poet.

Eliots grandfather was William Greenleaf Eliot, a famous Unitarian minister, educator, and philanthropist,

who died before T.S. Eliot was born. Eliot was raised to follow his grandfathers religious and moral

teachings, like optimism about the future, the innate goodness and Progress of mankind, avoiding

selfishness, and making personal sacrifices for the good of the greater community. He was educated in

Europe exactly at Merton College, in Oxford, and he began his career as a schoolmaster. Eliot was a poet,

playwright and literary critic

He had an encyclopedic culture and a deep knowledge of all world literatures. He admired Dante because

of his capacity to express personal feelings, to restraint, to find a balance between the personal and the

impersonal. Eliot was influenced by French symbolist, such as Bergson (about the concept of time). He had

knowledge and he used as sources Homer, Ovid, the Indian philosophy ancient rites and civilizations.

Eliot's work can be divided into two period: before and after his conversion to Anglicanism.

In the first period his literary production was characterized by a pessimistic vision of the world, a world

without hope, love, friendship. "The waste land" was written in this period. The characters in many of Eliots

poems were lonely, disconnected from other people, and overly concerned about their own unfulfilled wants

and needs, as opposed to being selfless and focusing on the greater good of the community. Many poems

were set in the present and paid little attention to past traditions.

Instead of optimism and Progress, many of his characters felt stuck in difficult situations they were

powerless to escape. Eliots poems usually stressed the darker side of human nature. Nearly all of these

themes can be detected in his breakthrough poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Purification, faith, hope, love are he keywords of the second period. "Journey of the Magi", "The Hollow

Man", "Murder in Cathedral", "Ash­Wednesday" belong to the new phase. As a critic he explained his poetic

vision in works such as "The Sacred Wood" and "On Poetry and Poets". He shared, with Joyce, the idea

that the artist must be impersonal.

Central in his poetry is the notion of "objective correlative". The poet doesn't describe an emotion directly

but he presents objects and actions in a certain way to produce the emotion more intensely. He was a very

prolific writer, in fact he was a famous playwright as well.

One of the main poems of his career was "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" and it was later

transformed in an amazing musical called "Cats". About his career he won the Nobel Prize in 1948, and he

died in London 1965. THE COMPLEXITY OF MODERN CIVILISATION Eliot is convinced that poetry

should represent the complexities of modern civilization, after the Second World War.

This complexity is the result of the fragmentation of the western cultural, religious tradition, mass production

and consumerism.

The only solution at his problem is to piece together this broken world fusing western traditions with those of

other culture; he combines different sources because he wants to preserve the culture and poetry in

particular from mass culture so that only literary people can access it. THE WASTE LAND "The Waste

Land" was published in 1922; it was dedicated to Ezra Pound.

This work represents a new type of poetry capable of expressing the post war sense of depression and

collapse of values. It consists of five sections: