Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American-English author and publisher.
Background
Ethnicity:
Eliot's parents were americans, but the Eliot family was supposed as the American branch of one of several British families to hold this surname.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888. He was descended from a distinguished New England family that had relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. Thomas Eliot's paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Louis; his mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, wrote poetry and was a social worker, a new profession in the early 20th century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children; his parents were both 44 years old when he was born.
Education
His family allowed him the widest education available in his time, with no influence from his father to be “practical” and to go into business. From Smith Academy in St. Louis he went to Milton, in Massachusetts; from Milton he entered Harvard in 1906; he received a B. A. in 1909, after three instead of the usual four years. The men who influenced him at Harvard were George Santayana, the philosopher and poet, and the critic Irving Babbitt. From Babbitt he derived an anti-Romantic attitude that, amplified by his later reading of British philosophers F. H. Bradley and T. E. Hulme, lasted through his life. In the academic year 1909–10 he was an assistant in philosophy at Harvard.
He spent the year 1910–11 in France, attending Henri Bergson’s lectures in philosophy at the Sorbonne and reading poetry with Alain-Fournier. Eliot’s study of the poetry of Dante, of the English writers John Webster and John Donne, and of the French Symbolist Jules Laforgue helped him to find his own style. From 1911 to 1914 he was back at Harvard, reading Indian philosophy and studying Sanskrit. In 1913 he read Bradley’s Appearance and Reality; by 1916 he had finished, in Europe, a dissertation entitled “Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. ” But World War I had intervened, and he never returned to Harvard to take the final oral examination for the Ph. D. degree. In 1914 Eliot met and began a close association with the American poet Ezra Pound.
Career
When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Eliot tried to join the United States Navy but was rejected for physical reasons. That year his first volume of verse, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared and almost immediately became the focus for discussion and controversy. Eliot's abruptly varied rhythms and his mixtures of precision and discontinuity, contemporary references and echoes of the past, and immediate experience and haunting leitmotifs spoke to the distraction and alienation that World War I had intensified in Western civilization. As literary editor of the Egoist, a feminist magazine, from 1917 to 1919, Eliot began the editorial and critical careers that would continue until his death. The back pages of the Egoist were entrusted to a succession of young poet-editors, and here, with the aid of Ezra Pound, the new poetry and criticism got a hearing. Eliot was also writing anonymous reviews for the London Times and publishing essays that announced the appearance of a sometimes pontifical but illuminating critic. In 1919 two of his most influential pieces appeared. "Tradition and the Individual Talent" advocated the "depersonalization" of poetry and a redirection of interest away from the poet's personality to the poem, the process, and the tradition to which the poem belonged. "Hamlet and His Problems" defined "objective correlative," a term soon to achieve wide currency, as a particular object, act, sequence, or situation which the poet infuses with a particular feeling in order to be able to call it up economically by mere mention of the thing or event. In this essay Eliot demonstrated the need to cut through received opinion to the literary work itself. In his early critical essays, collected as The Sacred Wood (1920), Homage to John Dryden (1924), Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (1932), and The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot pointed to the poets, critics, and cultural figures who had been helpful to him and might assist others in adjusting 20th-century experience to literary and cultural tradition.
When restless Pound left London for Paris in 1920, Eliot quietly assumed the leadership of England's young intelligentsia. While convalescing from exhaustion in 1921, Eliot advanced his diagnosis of war-enervated, spiritually moribund Europe with a draft of The Waste Land. This was to become, after publication in 1922, the most influential and controversial poem of the century. Eliot corresponded with Pound about the poem, and Pound's drastic editing compressed it, no doubt unifying and sharpening it. Eliot acknowledged Pound's help by dedicating the poem to him in Dante's words as "il miglior fabbro," the better maker. Also in 1922 Eliot founded the Criterion, an influential little magazine that appeared until 1939, when he discontinued its publication. In it he stressed learning, discipline, and the constant renewal of tradition in literature.
He left Lloyd's Bank in 1925 and joined Faber and Faber, Ltd. , a publisher, eventually rising to a directorship there. Meanwhile Eliot was crossing a divide in his career. He ended his preoccupation with one kind of alienation in "The Hollow Men" (1925), where the will-less subjects of the poem cluster in a dead land, waiting like effigies for a galvanic revelation that does not come. In 1934 Eliot published After Strange Gods and also brought his religious and dramatic interests together in The Rock. In 1936 Eliot concluded his Poems 1909-1935 with "Burnt Norton, " the first of what became the Four Quartets, an extended work that proved to be his poetic viaticum. This poem engendered three others, each associated with a place. "East Coker" (1940) is set in the village of Eliot's Massachusetts ancestors. The last two quartets appeared with the publication of Four Quartets (1943). The third, "The Dry Salvages, " named for three small islands off the Massachusetts coast where Eliot vacationed in his youth, draws on his American experiences; and the fourth, "Little Gidding, " derives from a visit to the site of a religious community, now an Anglican shrine, where the British king Charles I paused before he surrendered and went to his death. The Family Reunion, the first of Eliot's four plays for the professional stage, appeared in 1939. He later observed that its hero was a prig but its poetry the best in any of his plays. This play, like the other three, employs the familiar conventions of drawing-room comedy to encase religious matters. The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party (1940) both involve analogs with classical Greek dramas. Following World War II there were important changes in Eliot's life and literary activities.
On 29 June 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism from Unitarianism. He became a warden of his parish church, St Stephen's, Gloucester Road, London, and a life member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr. He specifically identified as Anglo-Catholic, proclaiming himself "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion". About 30 years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament".
With the heightened social consciousness of the worldwide economic depression, a reaction set in against his conservatism. It grew more difficult to explain away on literary grounds the anti-Semitic references in several of his poems. In After Strange Gods (1934) Eliot took the literary ideas of his "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and made them apply to culture.
He also declared that too many freethinking Jews would be a detriment to the kind of organic Christian culture he proposed. This work, along with The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes toward a Definition of Culture (1948), indicated Eliot's stand against the pluralistic society of most Western democracies. Without a reconstruction of Christendom, the alternative, he felt, was paganism. With Ash Wednesday (1930), while the literary tide was flowing Leftward, Eliot emerged as the sole orthodox Christian among important Anglo-American poets.
The magazine Criterion, also reflected his growing religiousness and his devotion to the idea of a culture stratified by class and unified by Christianity.
Views
Eliot was drawn to precision and concreteness in language, seeking "to purify the dialect of the tribe," as he later put it. He called attention to thematic or musical structure for communicating complex psychological experience, to past mergers of thought and feeling that could counteract the modern "dissociation of sensibility," and to the "mythical method" of James Joyce's novel Ulysses and of his own poetry-a method that contrasts the balance and sanity of masterpieces and the ages that produced them with the contemporary deracination that isolates individuals culturally and psychologically.
Quotations:
"I am very dependent upon women, I mean female society. "
Membership
Books Across the Sea
,
London
1943 - 1946
Member Classical Association
1941
Virgil Society
1943
Society of King Charles the Martyr
Personality
Thomas Stearns Eliot was shy, correct in dress, and intellectually independent. A rising poet and critic, Eliot made his way into elite British circles. The Bloomsbury group led by Leonard and Virginia Woolf welcomed him as a somewhat British American, both conservative and liberal leaders could accept him; and young writers on both sides of the Atlantic offered respect and affection.
In November, 1927 that year he took British citizenship.
Quotes from others about the person
Robert Penn Warren said: "He is the key figure of our century in America and England, the most powerful single influence. "
Interests
Writers
Mark Twain, Arthur Symons, Paul Verlaine, Tristan Corbière
Connections
Thomas Stearns Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood at Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915. The marriage was markedly unhappy, in part because of Vivienne's health issues. The couple formally separated in 1933.
On 10 January 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ceremony was held in a church at 6:15 am with virtually no one in attendance other than his wife's parents. Eliot had no children with either of his wives.