ELIOT, T(HOMAS) S(TEARNS)
(September 26, 1888--January 4, 1965)

American-born poet and essayist (who became a British subject in 1927), was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a distinguished New England family in the genteel tradition with roots in the church and in education. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a prominent businessman; his mother, Charlotte (Stearns) Eliot, concerned herself with community activities and wrote poetry. Young Tom Eliot spent the first eighteen years of his life in St. Louis. On completing his studies at Smith Academy (of Washington University) and spending a year at Milton Academy, he entered Harvard University in 1906.

Hard-working intellectually eclectic, and brilliant, he finished his undergraduate work in three years and took his M.A. in his fourth. Although reticent and reserved, Eliot outshone his classmates; he was admitted to both literary clubs (the Stylus and the Signet) and after he began contributing poems to the Harvard Advocate in 1907 he became its editor. He was something of a dandy at college--an Anglophile, fussy in the studied carelessness of his dress, and known for his witty and precise remarks free of slang and preciousness.

In 1910-1911 he studied in Paris at the Sorbonne and then returned to Harvard for Ph.D. work in philosophy (1911-1914). His dissertation on F. H. Bradley completed and accepted (but not published until 1964), he went to Germany on a travel scholarship and later attended Oxford University for a year, but was prevented by the outbreak of World War I from returning to Harvard for the oral defense required for a doctorate. Thus Eliot's career turned away from university teaching and led him to writing poetry and essays.

In 1915 Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and settled in London, earning his living at first by teaching a variety of subjects at Highgate School and later by working as a clerk in the foreign department at Lloyds Bank from 1917 to 1925. But the demands of neither job undid his devotion to writing. Poor health kept him from military service during the war. In his spare time he wrote poetry and reviews, lectured, and associated with the Bloomsbury group. From 1917 to 1919 he served as assistant editor of the Egoist, where he published some of his criticism. Two important factors in Eliot's development as a poet were his introduction to French symbolist poetry and his friendship with fellow expatriate American Ezra Pound. It was in Pound that Eliot found a devoted mentor and a sensitive critic of the early drafts of his poems. With Pound's help, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was published in Poetry in 1915 and "Preludes" in Blast that same year--thus launching Eliot into the midst of literary modernism. His first book of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared a couple of years later. "Prufrock" is a long dramatic monologue about a fastidious middle-aged man who is unable to overcome his emotional timidity to find love and meaning in life; Prufrock's frustrations reflect the dilemmas of modern society, especially middle-class culture. This sense of a fragmented and doomed world marks the work of many writers in the decade following World War I. The poem is written with a precise and occasionally sinuous rhythm; the images, often surreal but sometimes ordinary, are always evocative yet a bit elusive:

Let us go then, you and
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table

Eliot's next volume of Poems was handprinted at the Hogarth Press by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. In 1921 he began work on The Waste Land, finishing the long poem in a sanatorium in Switzerland where he had gone after suffering a nervous breakdown brought about by general depression, overwork, and increasing marital difficulties. The manuscript shows a great debt to Pound who deleted much material and to whom the completed poem is dedicated. It was first published in the Criterion in England and in the Dial in the United States. The Waste Land, like "Prufrock," is a summation of the disillusionment of the postwar generation and the tragedy of contemporary civilization.

Principal Works: Poetry--.Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917; Poems, 1919; Ara Vos Prec, 1920; The Waste Land, 1922; Poems, 1909-1925, 1925; Wanna Go Home, Baby?, 1927; Journey of the Magi, 1927; A Song for Simeon, 1928; Animula, 1929; Marina, 1930; Ash-Wednesday, 1930; Triumphal March, 1931; Sweeney Agonistes, 1932; The Rock, 1934; The Waste Land and Other Poems, 1934; Collected Poems, 1909-1935, 1936; Later Poems, 1925-1935, 1941; Four Quartets, 1943 ("Burnt Norton," 1936; "East Coker," 1940; "The Dry Salvages," 1941; "Little Gidding," 1942); Selected Poems, 1948; The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1952; 1952; The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, 1954; Collected Poems, 1909-1962, 1963; Poems Written in Early Youth, 1967; The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot, 1969; The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (ed. V. Eliot) 1971. Drama--Murder in the Cathedral, 1935; The Family Reunion, 1939; The Cocktail Party, 1950; (with G. Hoellering) The Film of Murder in the Cathedral, 1952; The Confidential Clerk, 1954; The Elder Statesman, 1959; The Complete Plays of T. S. Eliot, 1967. Juvenile--Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, 1939. Nonfiction--Ezra Pound, His Metric and Poetry, 1917; The Sacred Wood, 1920; Three Critical Essays, 1920; Andrew Marvell, 1924; Homage to John Dryden, 1924; For Lancelot Andrewes, 1928; Dante, 1929; Tradition and Experiment in Present-Day Literature, 1929; Thoughts after Lambeth, 1931; Selected Essays, 1917-1932, 1932; John Dryden, the Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic, 1932; The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933; After Strange Gods, 1934; Elizabethan Essays, 1934; Essays, Ancient and Modern, 1936; The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939; Points of View, 1941; Reunion by Destruction, 1943; From Poe to Valery, 1948: Notes towards the Definition of Culture, 1948; Selected Essays, 1950; Poetry and Drama, 1951; Selected Prose (ed. J. Hayward) 1953; The Three Voices of Poetry, 1953; Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern, 1954; On Poetry and Poets, 1957; Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, 1964; To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings, 1965; Milton: Two Studies, 1968; Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (ed. F. Kermode) 1975. As translator--Anabasis (by St.-John Perse) 1930. Correspondence--The Letters of T. S. Eliot (ed. V. Eliot): Volume I, 1898-1922, 1988.

About: Ackroyd, P. T. S. Eliot, 1984; Asbee, S. T. S. Eliot, 1990; Austin, A. T. S. Eliot: The Literary and Social Criticism, 1971; Bagchee, S. (ed.) T. S. Eliot: A Voice Descending, 1990; Bedient, C. He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist, 1986; Behr, C. T. S. Eliot, 1983; Bergonzi, B. T. S. Eliot, 1972; Bloom, H. T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, 1988; Bloom, H. (ed.) T. S. Eliot: Modern Critical Views, 1985; Bradbrook, M. C. T. S. Eliot, 1965; Braybrooke, N. (ed.) T. S. Eliot: A Symposium for His Seventieth Birthday, 1958; Brooker, J. S. and Bentley, J. Reading The Waste Land, 1990; Browne, E. M. The Making of T. S. Eliot's Plays, 1969; Bush, R. T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style, 1985; Bush, R. (ed.) T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History, 1991; Calder, A. T. S. Eliot, 1987; Chace, W. M. Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, 1973; Chiari, J. T. S. Eliot, Poet and Dramatist, 1972; San Juan, E., Jr. (ed.) A Casebook on Gerontion, 1970; Sultan, S. Eliot, Joyce and Company, 1987; Tate, A. (ed.) T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, 1966; Tomlin, E.W.F. T. S. Eliot, 1988; Tomlinson, C. Poetry and Metamorphosis, 1983; Traversi, D. T. S. Eliot: The Longer Poems, 1976; Unger, L. Eliot's Compound Ghost, 1982; Unger, L. T. S. Eliot, 1961; Unger, L. (ed.) T. S. Eliot: A Selected Critique, 1948; Wagner, L. W. (ed.) T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Criticism, 1974; Williamson, G. A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot, 1953.