T.S.

ELIOT
1888-1965

AMERICAN- ENGLISH POET,

PLAYWRIGHT AND CRITIC
 THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT
• T.S. Eliot (born September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.—died
January 4, 1965, London, England) was an American-English poet,
playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist
movement in poetry.
• He obtained a position as clerk in Lloyd's Bank which he held until
1925, when he joined the London publishing firm Faber and Faber,
becoming a director of the firm.
• Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the
1920s until late in the century.
• Eliot left America in 1910 and in 1915 he settled in
London. In 1927 he became a British citizen and was
confirmed in the Church of England (Anglicanism).
• In a volume of essays, For Lancelot Andrewes (1928),
Eliot publicly declared that he was "classicist in
literature, royalist in politics, and anglo- catholic in
religion“. This explains his political, social, religious
and philosophical views.
• In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
• After his formal acceptance of Anglican
Christianity we find a penitential note in much
of his verse, and a note of searching for spiritual
peace, with a lot of allusions to the Bible, to
liturgy, to mystical religious literature and to
Dante. This "penitential" and questioning mood
is found in Ash Wednesday (1930), which is a
poem in six parts, and in the Ariel poems,
among others.
His first important publication, and the first
masterpiece of Modernism in English, was “The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915). Its meaning is
enlarged by echoes, often ironic, from Hesiod, Dante
and Shakespeare.

Eliot´s most famous poem, published after World

War I is “The Wasteland” (1922) where he deals with
aspects of the decay of culture in the modern world.
He reached a great height in the literary world
with the series of poems entitled “The Four
Quartets”(1943). It explores religious moods,
dealing with the relation between time and
eternity.

He published plays: Murder in the Cathedral

(1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail
Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954) and
The Elder Statesman (1959).
 He also published much criticism, reviews, lectures and
addresses.

❑ Eliot's plays have all been, directly or indirectly, on religious

themes.
Murder in the Cathedral (1935) written entirely in verse, deals
with the the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket in a ritual
manner, with much use of a chorus and the central speech in
the form of a sermon by the archbishop in his cathedral shortly
before his murder.
• Eliot studied literature and philosophy at Harvard
University, the Sorbonne University and Oxford
University.
• He was influenced there by the anti-romanticism of
the times, as well as by the enthusiasm that prevailed
in certain Harvard circles for Elizabethan and
Jacobean literature, the Italian Renaissance, and
Indian mystical philosophy.
• He made personal contact with the French poets of
the Symbolist movement. He was influenced by Jules
Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire.
• Eliot learned from the Imagists the necessity of clear, hard and precise
images.
Imagism: A school of poetry that flourished between 1909 and 1917 in
England. Imagists believed that poetry should use ordinary language,
be innovative as regards technique, be free to deal with any subject,
and work through hard, precise clear imagery rather than through
allowing the author's own voice to intrude into the poem. They were
in part a reaction against the loose, sentimental and highly subjective
poetry of the latter part of the nineteenth century. Their leader was
Ezra Pound (1885-1972). They prefered the urban landscape and were
concerned with the absolute abstention of any unnecessary word.
• A deep and lasting influence on Eliot was the medieval poet Dante
Alighieri (1265-1321), and his masterpiece The Divine Comedy,
which he learned to read in the original Italian.
• He also turned to the poetry of The Metaphysical poets :John
Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, among others.
• The Metaphysical poets were a group of poets writing between
1610 and 1680. The classification “Metaphysical poetry” was
invented considerably after the group flourished. The adjective
refers to the condition that it is both intellectual and emotional,
exploring both intellectual matters and emotional or psychological
ones, usually at a high pitch of intensity. It uses ordinary speech as
well as terms drawn from the science and scientific concepts of the
day.
• Eliot had a strong influence in reviving
interest in the 17th-century poets known
as The Metaphysical Poets.
Their work is a blend of emotion and
intellectual ingenuity or “wit”,
characterized by conceit.

Example: “The Flea” by John Donne

• Conceit is a literary device, and it refers to a highly
elaborate metaphor, created by putting together
apparently unconnected ideas and things so that
the reader is startled out of his complacency .
Example:
“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;[… ]”.
from “The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock” by T.S.Eliot
• Eliot experimented in diction, style, and
versification and revitalized English poetry.
• He gave a quality of music to his verse, with the
intention of evoking moods and creating
atmosphere.
• He used free-verse.
• He struggled to create new verse rhythms based
on the rhythms of contemporary speech.
• He sought a poetic diction that might be close
to spoken language, endowing apparently
unpoetic modern objects with significance.
• He sought expression in poetry for the secret,
subconscious currents of the mind.
• He used literary quotations and reminiscences
with seeming casualness in obedience to these
impulsions of the mind.
• “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” and “Preludes”
were first published in the literary journal Blast
(1915) and then in Eliot's first published volume
of poems “Prufrock and Other
Observations”(1917).

• The poems are a representation of T.S. Eliot's

poetic style and themes. They are known as the
“city poems”.
• The poems reflect the modern world’s
degraded state through allusions,
symbolism, and imagery (not direct
statement).

• Eliot explores some of his thematic

concerns: dehumanization,moral
debasement, alienation, and
disillusionment in a modern urban
• The poems deal with a meaningless
modern urban life, decadence and the
human condition within these.

• In the poems there is an exploration of the

philosophical concepts of time and
memory.
“Rhapsody on a Windy Night” captures
the tortured and fragmented human
psyche amidst a destructed world. The
speaker wanders on an urban street late
at night, lit by lamps.
“Preludes” is a chilling exploration of life
amidst urban decay, alienation, and
absence of meaning in the dark modern
world. It explores spiritual and moral
desolation, the hollowness of meaningless
daily pursuits in the degraded modern
world. It represents urban life as having an
unhealthy effect on the mind.
 ALLUSION TO MUSIC IN THE POEMS´ TITLES
• Rhapsody: a musical •Eliot ’ s musical allusions
composition of irregular form indicate that the focus of
that expresses powerful, intense
feelings.
each poem is a state of
• Prelude: a short musical
mind, an atmosphere, or
composition that may serve as an impression rather than
an introduction to a usually a determinate event or
longer and more complex work,
or it may also be a stand-alone
character.
piece of work.
• T.S.Eliot was highly influenced by Henri
Bergson (1859 – 1941), a French philosopher,
and his theories on time and memory.
Bergson distinguished between time as we
actually experience it, lived time – which he
called ‘real duration’ (durée réelle), a
continuous flow – and the mechanistic time of
science, measured time, which is perceived as a
succession of separate, fixed frames.
Bergson believed that we don’t really experience
life as a succession of separate conscious states,
progressing along an imaginary line. Instead, we
feel time as a continuous flow, with no clearly
demarcated beginnings and ends. We should not
therefore confuse an abstract, arbitrary notion of
practical convenience (clock time) with the
underlying truth that is continuously confirmed
by our own experience (psychological time).
He was against the ascendancy of the
mechanistic outlook of time throughout most
of the twentieth century. He considered the
mechanistic view alone as singularly
ill-equipped to understand the immense
variety and depth of human experience. He
regretted that the main underlying perception
of our modern, urban-industrial society
remains mechanistic and soulless.
 BERGSON AND MEMORY
•Bergson suggests that memory operates as a creative force,
actively molding our perception of reality. It does not present
a neutral or objective representation of the past, but rather
filters and interprets past experiences to construct our
understanding of the present moment.
• He proposes that memory is intertwined with our
perception, constantly shaping and influencing how we
perceive the world around us.
 REFERENCES TO TIME IN THE POEMS
Rhapsody on a Windy Night Preludes
• Times of day: evening (section I),
• Times of the day: twelve o´clock,
half-past one, half- past two, morning rush hours (section II),
half-past three and four o´clock nightime before dawn (III), and back to
a.m. Time is measured by the evening rush hour (IV).
street lamps. Four (4) hours.
• Themes: Loneliness, waste and decay.
• Themes: Loneliness,
desillusionment, hopelessness, The passage of time as futile and without
futility, waste and decay. Human a goal. There is a negative representation
conscioussnes and memory. Time of time, measured out and reduced to a
and death. meaningless, mechanical repetition.