Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was an American-born poet, dramatist, and literary critic, whose works, such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets, are considered defining achievements of twentieth century Modernist poetry. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He is widely considered one of the most influential poets of the 20th century.
Eliot was born into a prominent family from St. Louis, Missouri. Later, he said that "having passed one's childhood beside the big river" (the Mississippi) influenced his poetry. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis; his mother, née Charlotte Chauncy Stearns (1843–1929), taught school prior to marriage, and wrote poems. He was their last child; his parents were 44 years old when he was born. His four surviving sisters were about eleven to nineteen years older than he, and his brother, eight years older.
William Greenleaf Eliot, Eliot's grandfather, was a Unitarian minister who moved to St. Louis when it was still on the frontier and was instrumental in founding many of the city's institutions, including Washington University in St. Louis. One distant cousin was Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, and a fifth cousin, another Tom Eliot, was Chancellor of Washington University. Eliot's works often allude to his youth in St. Louis (there was a Prufrock furniture store in town) and to New England. (His family had Massachusetts ties and summered at a large cottage they had built in Gloucester, MA. The cottage, close to the shore at Eastern Point, had a view of the sea and the young Eliot would often go sailing.)
From 1898 to 1905, Eliot was a day student at St. Louis's Smith Academy, a preparatory school for Washington University. At the academy, Eliot studied Latin, Greek, French and German. Although, upon graduation, he could have gone to Harvard University, his parents sent him, for a preparatory year, to Milton Acad/i> published some of his poems, and he became life-long friends with Conrad Aiken. The following year, he earned a master's degree at Harvard. In the 1910–1911 school year, Eliot lived in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and touring the continent. Returning to Harvard in 1911 as a doctoral student in philosophy, Eliot studied the writings of F.H. Bradley, Buddhism, and Indic philology, (learning Sanskrit and Pali to read some of the religious texts.) He was awarded a scholarship to attend Merton College, Oxford in 1914, and before settling there, he visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer program in philosophy. When World War I broke out, however, he went to London and then to Oxford. Eliot was not happy at Merton and declined a second year of attendance. Instead, in the summer of 1915, he married, and, after a short visit to the U.S. to meet with his family (not taking his wife), he took a few teaching jobs. He continued to work on his dissertation and, in the spring of 1916, sent it to Harvard, which accepted it. Because he did not appear in person to defend the thesis, however, he was not awarded his Ph.D. (In 1964, the dissertation was published as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.) During Eliot's university career, he studied with George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, Henri Bergson, C. R. Lanman, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim.
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Tom & Viv
Brian Gilbert's 1994 movie starring Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson which looks into the relationship of T. S. Eliot and Vivienne Haigh-Wood.
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In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot complained that he was still a virgin (he was 26), adding "I am very dependent upon women. I mean female society." Less than four months later he was introduced by a fellow American at Oxford, Scofield Thayer, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood (May 28, 1888 – January 22, 1947), a Cambridge governess. On 26 June 1915, Eliot and Vivien (the name she preferred), respectively aged 26 and 27 years old, were married in a register office. Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds were staying with Russell in his flat. Some critics have suggested that Vivien and Russell had an affair (see Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow), but these allegations have never been confirmed. In the 1960s, Eliot would write: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with [Vivienne] simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her the marriage brought no happiness. To me it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."
After leaving Merton, Eliot worked as a school teacher and, to earn extra money, wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses. In 1917, he took a position at Lloyds Bank in London where he worked on foreign accounts. In 1925, he left Lloyds to become a director of the publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber) where he remained for the rest of his career.
In 1927 Eliot took British citizenship and converted to Anglicanism (on June 29). Eliot separated from Vivienne in 1933, and in 1938 Vivienne was committed to Northumberland House, a mental hospital north of London where she died in 1947 without ever having been visited by her husband. Eliot's second marriage was happy, but short. On January 10, 1957 he married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, to whom he was introduced by Collin Brooks. In sharp contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Valerie well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August, 1949. As was his marriage to Vivienne, the wedding was kept a secret in order to preserve his privacy. The ceremony was held in a church at 6:15 A.M. with virtually no one other than his wife's parents in attendance. Valerie was 38 years younger than her husband, and the years of her widowhood have been spent preserving his legacy; she has edited and annotated The Letters of T.S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land.
Eliot died of emphysema in London on January 4, 1965. For many years he had health problems owing to the combination of London air and his heavy smoking, often being laid low with bronchitis or tachycardia. His body was cremated and, according to Eliot's wishes, the ashes taken to St. Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from which Eliot's ancestors emigrated to America. There, a simple plaque commemorates him. On the second anniversary of his death a large stone placed on the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey was dedicated to Eliot. This commemoration contains his name, an indication that he had received the Order of Merit, dates, and a quotation from Little Gidding: "the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living."
Late in his life, Eliot exchanged numerous letters with the comedian Groucho Marx. A portrait of Marx, which Eliot had requested, was proudly displayed in Eliot's home next to pictures of the poets Yeats and Valery. The correspondence with Marx, a Jew, needs to be taken into account in any discussion of Eliot and anti-Semitism, and also serves to emphasize the comic sense that, in "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," engendered in its time the longest-running Broadway musical in history.
Eliot made his home in London. After the war, in the 1920s, he would spend time with other great artists in the Montparnasse Quarter in Paris, where he was photographed by Man Ray. French poetry was a particularly strong influence on Eliot's work, in particular Charles Baudelaire, whose clear-cut images of Paris city life provided a model for Eliot's own images of London. He dabbled early in the study of Sanskrit and eastern religions and was a student of G. I. Gurdjieff. Eliot's work, following his conversion to Christianity and the Church of England, is often (always?) religious in nature and also tries to preserve historical English and broadly European values that Eliot thought important. In 1928, Eliot summarised his beliefs well when he wrote in the preface to his book For Lancelot Andrewes that "The general point of view [of the book's essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion." This period includes such major works as Ash Wednesday, The Journey of the Magi, and Four Quartets.
Eliot's plays, mostly in verse, include Sweeney Agonistes (1925), Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958). Murder in the Cathedral is about the death of Thomas Becket. Eliot admitted being influenced by, among others, the works of 17th century preacher Lancelot Andrewes. The dramatic works of Eliot are less well known than his poems, but worth investigating, e.g. in the recorded version of The Cocktail Party with Sir Alec Guinness in the lead role of An Unidentified Guest (Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly). Murder in the Cathedral has been a standard choice for Anglican and Roman Catholic curricula for many years.
Eliot is known for his critical and theoretical writing, particularly for his advocacy of the "objective correlative," the notion that art should not be a personal expression, but should work through objective universal symbols. There is fierce critical debate over the pragmatic value of the objective correlative, and Eliot's failure to follow its dicta. It is claimed that there is evidence throughout his work of contrary practice (e.g. part II of The Waste Land in the section beginning "My nerves are bad tonight"); but of course the worth of the idea is by no means negated by alleged lapses in practice, here as elsewhere.
In 1958 the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed Eliot (and also C.S. Lewis) to a commission which resulted in "The Revised Psalter" (1963). In 1939, he published a book of poetry for children, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats – "Old Possum" being a name Pound had bestowed upon him. After his death, this work became the basis of the hit West End and Broadway musical by Andrew Loyd Webber, Cats.
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