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Poet, publisher, playwright, and critic, born at St Louis, Missouri. In 1914 he met Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to settle in England; in June 1915 he married Vivien Haigh- Wood, and in the same month his poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ appeared (also with Pound’s encouragement) in Poetry. In 1917 Eliot began to work for Lloyds Bank; he was also assistant editor of the Egoist. His first volume of verse Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), was followed by Poems (1919), hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press; the two volumes struck a new note in modern poetry, satiric, allusive, cosmopolitan, at times lyric and elegiac.
In 1922 Eliot founded a new quarterly, the Criterion; in the firs issue appeared, with much éclat, The Waste Land, which established him decisively as the voice of a disillusioned generation. In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds and became a director of Faber and Faber, where he built up a list of poets (including Ezra Pound, Herbert Read, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and George Barker; which represented the mainstream of the modern movement in poetry in England.
In 1927 Eliot became a British subject and a member of the Anglican Church; his pilgrimage towards his own particular brand of High Anglicanism may be charted in his poetry through ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), ‘The Journey of the Magi’ (1927), and ‘Ash- Wednesday’ (1930), to its culminating vision in Four Quartets (1935–42). His prose also shows the same movement; for example, the title essay of For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) praises tradition, prayer, and liturgy, and points away from ‘personality’ towards hierarchy and community, and in the preface to this collection he describes himself as a ‘classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’. The same preoccupation with tradition continued to express itself in his critical works.
In the 1930s Eliot began his attempt to revive poetic drama. Sweeney Agonistes (1932), an ‘Aristophanic fragment’ which gives, in syncopated rhythms, a satiric impression of the sterility of proletarian life, was followed by a pageant play, The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), and three ‘comedies’: The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959). Eliot’s classic book of verse for children, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), which reveals the aspect of his character that claimed the influence of Edwar Lear, achieved a considerable stag success in a musical adaptation, Cats, in 1981.
In his combination of literary and social criticism, Eliot may be called the Matthew Arnold of the 20th century. The Sacred Wood (1920), his first collection of criticism, contained several influential essa including ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, in which he applied the phrase ‘objective correlative’ to poetic and dramatic creation. In his later criticism, including The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), and Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), Eliot turned increasingly to the relations of culture and society. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the OM in 1948.
In the 1980s and 1990s the idea of postmodernism was most readily established by criticising the authoritarianism and conservatism of modernism, and Eliot, as the exemplary modernist poet, suffered. More specifically, Eliot’s poetry and prose were criticised for their misogyny an anti-Semitism. There is a biography by Peter Ackroyd (1984).
In 1922 Eliot founded a new quarterly, the Criterion; in the firs issue appeared, with much éclat, The Waste Land, which established him decisively as the voice of a disillusioned generation. In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds and became a director of Faber and Faber, where he built up a list of poets (including Ezra Pound, Herbert Read, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and George Barker; which represented the mainstream of the modern movement in poetry in England.
In 1927 Eliot became a British subject and a member of the Anglican Church; his pilgrimage towards his own particular brand of High Anglicanism may be charted in his poetry through ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), ‘The Journey of the Magi’ (1927), and ‘Ash- Wednesday’ (1930), to its culminating vision in Four Quartets (1935–42). His prose also shows the same movement; for example, the title essay of For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) praises tradition, prayer, and liturgy, and points away from ‘personality’ towards hierarchy and community, and in the preface to this collection he describes himself as a ‘classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’. The same preoccupation with tradition continued to express itself in his critical works.
In the 1930s Eliot began his attempt to revive poetic drama. Sweeney Agonistes (1932), an ‘Aristophanic fragment’ which gives, in syncopated rhythms, a satiric impression of the sterility of proletarian life, was followed by a pageant play, The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), and three ‘comedies’: The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959). Eliot’s classic book of verse for children, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), which reveals the aspect of his character that claimed the influence of Edwar Lear, achieved a considerable stag success in a musical adaptation, Cats, in 1981.
In his combination of literary and social criticism, Eliot may be called the Matthew Arnold of the 20th century. The Sacred Wood (1920), his first collection of criticism, contained several influential essa including ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, in which he applied the phrase ‘objective correlative’ to poetic and dramatic creation. In his later criticism, including The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), and Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), Eliot turned increasingly to the relations of culture and society. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the OM in 1948.
In the 1980s and 1990s the idea of postmodernism was most readily established by criticising the authoritarianism and conservatism of modernism, and Eliot, as the exemplary modernist poet, suffered. More specifically, Eliot’s poetry and prose were criticised for their misogyny an anti-Semitism. There is a biography by Peter Ackroyd (1984).