Plan: General background

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)

A great many of modern English writers and critics recognize in T.S. Eliot the most intluential of the English poets of the 20^th century. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, USA, where his grandfather had founded the Washington University. Eliot receivec his first university training at Harvard; later he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, and Oxford. Settled in London in 1914 First drafts of some of his best early poems, like "T he Love Sonj of J. Alfred Prufrock", were written while Eliot was still at Harvard but the style and tone were so new that he did not manage to ge anything published till 1915. His first volume of poems, "Prulrocl and Other Observations" was published in 1917, but it didn't at tract wide attention. At that time Eliot was working in a bank anc also reviewing for "The Times Literary Supplement" and for somt little magazines. His first volume of criticism, "The Sacred Wood' (1920), became suddenly influential and his poem, "The Wast* Land" (1922), made him famous, though it infuriated conservative critics.

Many of Elliot's views on literature appeared in "The Criterion" a literary magazine he edited from 1922 to 1939. The main sub ject of his earlier poetry is that of a civilization doomed to ar inglorious end. From the French symbolists he had borrowed tlu idea that the only reality in life was the inner reality that the work of the poet was superior to the world of common experience tha poetry should not work by direct statement of description, but b) indirect image and suggestion.

Eliot served as a director of a London publishing house froir 1925 until his death. His most important creations of that timt were "The Hollow Men" (1925), "Ash Wednesday" and "Foui Quartets" (1930). "The Hollow Men" is a devastating portraya of human beings devoid of spiritual substance. This poem consist of five sections, the first of which is given below:

I

We are the hollow men *

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats* feet over broken grass In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without color, Paralyzed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us - if at all - not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.

In this work Eliot portrays the post-World-War 1 people as hollow men. He depicts hollow men as walking corpses: their mind is detached from reality, they are cut off from one another. Their voices are whispers, "quiet and meaningless". They are detached from nature, and live in a place which is devoid of any spiritual presence, a "dead land", a "cactus land", "a valley of dying stars", hollow like the men themselves. Eliot's last major poem "Four Quartets" is deeply religious.

Eliot's poetry makes a great demand on the reader's erudition, on his capacity to understand the complex literary, philosophical and mythological allusions that characterize Eliot's verse. His great achievement was to create rhythms and images corresponding to the tensions and stresses of modern life. He is the person most directly responsible for changing the course of literary style and taste in English literature.

T.S. Eliot also wrote several verse dramas. His dramatic poem "Murder in the Cathedral"(1935) and four tragicomedies, "The Family Reunion" (1939), "The Cocktail Party" (1950), "The Confidential Clerk" and "The Elder Statesman", held a much wider audience than his non-dramatic works.

Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize.