T.S. Eliot Overview

T. S. Eliot looked out on the landscape of the modern world after World War I and saw a place of disillusionment, shattered community, and lost spirituality. His poems describe the greyness of this sterile terrain and summon the traditions of... [more]

T. S. Eliot looked out on the landscape of the modern world after World War I and saw a place of disillusionment, shattered community, and lost spirituality. His poems describe the greyness of this sterile terrain and summon the traditions of the past -- both literary and religious -- to transcend the dead-end of the present. Finding no guidance in the treacly sentimentality of Victorian literature or the overblown egotism of the Romantics, Eliot reached back to Dante and Medieval epics as models. He exalted the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century (principally John Donne) for keeping emotion moored to thought, and admired the French Symbolists' precise use of imagery. Out of this selective tradition, Eliot derived a personal poetics and a set of concepts for literary criticism. In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1917) we overhear the thoughts of the thwarted modern male whose life is too unheroic to encompass love. The mood is set by idiosyncratic images that recall Eliot's theory of the "objective correlative" -- an object that precisely evokes an emotion. "The Wasteland" (1922) is a critique of modernity on a larger scale. Famously obscure, it combines slang with highly erudite language in a collage of episodes based on the search for the Holy Grail. Here, it is a search for redemption in the barren, secular world of post-war Europe. "Ash Wednesday" (1927) reflects upon Eliot's own conversion to the Church of England, and "The Four Quartets" (1943) intertwines his personal history with that of humanity at large in order to examine time and meaning. These works, complemented by his critical essays and dramas, won Eliot the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. He led a somewhat bland life as an American expatriot in London, working for a time as a bank clerk and later as an editor. His retreats to the past and to the mental in his writing may reveal an elitist bent in him; no doubt, he voted for a Modernism that would bring back the highest cultural standards. [show less]