T.S Eliot Life and Works

T.
S ELIOT LIFE AND WORKS:

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He lived
in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University . In
1910, he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate
and master’s degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate.
After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy but
returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married
Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for
Lloyd's Bank.
It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound,
who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in
a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in
1915.
With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the
single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century,
Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the next
thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the
English-speaking world.
As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the
seventeenth century (most notably John Donne) and the nineteenth century French
symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical innovations in poetic
technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the
disillusionment of a younger post–World War I generation with the values and
conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era.
As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste,
propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties,
were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism.
He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber
& Faber, he published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm.
After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933,
and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. T. S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1948. He died in London on January 4, 1965.
ASH-WEDNESDAY
T. S. Eliot’s 1930 poem Ash-Wednesday needs to be viewed as part of the shift in
Eliot’s writing towards a more devotional aspect, a shift that would culminate in Four
Quartets (1943). The poem, like The Waste Land and ‘The Hollow Men’ before it, had
started life as shorter poems: Part II appeared in 1927, Part I in 1928, and Part III in
1929, with the other three sections being written around these. But the eventual six-part
poem is one of the finest modernist religious poems in English, although its content
requires some summary and analysis to be approachable and comprehensible.
Ash-Wednesday (note the hyphen) is perhaps, of all Eliot’s poems, the most heavily
indebted to Dante. Eliot would write more essays on Dante than on any other poet, and
the importance of Dante’s work to Eliot precedes his conversion to Christianity in 1927.
The Italian medieval poet is known for his three-part epic poem The Divine Comedy,
which describes the poet’s descent into the ‘inferno’ of hell, followed by his trip to
purgatory, culminating in his arrival in the ‘paradise’ of heaven. Two of Eliot’s most
famous earlier poems directly draw on Dante’s work: the epigraph to ‘The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock’ is from the poet, while the lines about the ‘Unreal City’ of London in
The Waste Land (‘I had not thought death had undone so many’) are a loose translation
from Dante’s original Italian.
As well as parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy – which we might describe as a meditation

on Christianity – Eliot in Ash-Wednesday also draws on another poem by Dante, the
Vita Nuova (literally ‘New Life’), a collection of courtly love poems about idealised
beauty and its relation to religious faith. This is a key source for any analysis of the
importance of the feminine imagery in Ash-Wednesday, because it points up that Ash-
Wednesday is not just a religious poem, but also a love poem. However, it is about
spiritual love rather than worldly love – the female figures who appear in the poem, the
‘Lady’ and the ‘veiled sister’, are closer to versions of the Virgin Mary than they are to
any earthly woman. As well as Dante, there are also allusions to numerous other
sources, including Shakespeare’s sonnets (the line ‘Desiring this man’s gift and that
man’s scope’ is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s line ‘Desiring this man’s art and that
man’s scope’ from Sonnet 29), the Book of Common Prayer, and the poetry of
seventeenth-century Metaphysical (and devotional) poets such as John Donne and
George Herbert.
The poem’s subject is suggested obliquely by its title, Ash-Wednesday. Ash
Wednesday, the day after Shrove Tuesday in the Christian calendar, is the first day of
Lent, which is a period of forty days’ penance and fasting to commemorate the forty
days Christ spent fasting in the wilderness, where he was tempted by Satan and
triumphed over him. Traditionally, it’s a time for repentance for past sins. The ‘ash’
refers to the blessing of the ashes of palm branches (from the previous Sunday, Palm
Sunday), which are then marked on believers’ foreheads in a cross shape by the priest,
accompanied by the words ‘Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return’.
The theme of Ash-Wednesday, summarised in brief, is the turning away from the world
and towards God. Eliot had become increasingly dissatisfied with the ‘real world’ and
the sense of sickness and decay which he saw at the root of modern life: think about all
of the sterility and loss of spiritual meaning in The Waste Land, and then the hollowness
of ‘The Hollow Men’, caught in some in-between world. Modern life has lost its meaning
and its ‘edge’. Through religion, Eliot found a way to restore that meaning, and this is
what Ash-Wednesday is about. When he begins with talk of ‘turning’ (‘Because I do not
hope to turn again’), he is referring to this act of turning from the world and towards
God, from the real towards the spiritual – towards the message of Ash Wednesday. The
world is the desert, and God is the garden: the modern world is a deserted space, like
the space of ‘The Hollow Men’ or The Waste Land, while the garden – a world of growth
and life – is the world of God.
There seems to be an invitation to align this world, ‘The dreamcrossed twilight between
birth and dying’, with the ‘twilight kingdom’ in which the hollow men found themselves
trapped.
But where ‘The Hollow Men’ could offer nothing but despair, Ash-Wednesday – or, to be
more precise, the end of Ash-Wednesday – can restore meaning and joy to this ‘twilight’
world in which he find ourselves.
SOURCES:
https://poets.org/poet/t-s-eliot
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/t-s-eliot

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S ELIOT LIFE AND WORKS:

As well as parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy – which we might describe as a meditation

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