T.S. Eliot

Biography

Who Was T.S. Eliot?

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888, into a family with deep New England roots and Unitarian convictions, and educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Merton College, Oxford, before settling permanently in England. He became, with the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, the most influential poet of his generation – a work whose fragmented structure, multiplicity of voices and languages, and pervasive sense of spiritual exhaustion came to define how an entire era understood itself.

In 1927, Eliot was baptized into the Church of England, describing himself afterward as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” The poetry that followed his conversion is markedly different in character from The Waste Land: Ash-Wednesday (1930) and, above all, Four Quartets (1943) are sustained religious meditations, drawing on the Christian mystical tradition (Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross) alongside Eliot's characteristic erudition, and moving toward moments of genuine arrival – the rose garden, the chapel at Little Gidding, the fire and the rose becoming one – that The Waste Land had been unable to reach.

Eliot is significant for TLA because his own career enacts, across roughly two decades, the structure TLA traces within individual texts: The Waste Land is a portrait of the world after rupture – fragmented, dry, unable to complete its own rituals (the Grail chapel is empty; April, which should bring renewal, instead “breeds” out of dead land); Four Quartets is the same poet, writing from the other side of a conversion, working out what a real arrival might look like. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 and died in 1965.

Notable Quotes

In Their Own Words

Key Works

Selected Bibliography

• “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” – 1915
• The Waste Land – 1922
• Ash-Wednesday – 1930
• Murder in the Cathedral – 1935
• Four Quartets – 1943

Discussion

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