Theme: modernism in american literature contents: introduction chapter the early twentieth century literature (1901-1939). Modernism

T.S. Eliot

1888-1965

At the time when he was regarded as America’s most eminent living poet, T.S. Eliot announced that he was an “Anglo-Catholic in religion, a royalist in politics, and a classicist in literature.” T.S. Eliot’s family was rooted in New England, yet he was born into a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri, where his father was the chancellor of Washington University. Eliot’s childhood awareness of his native city would show itself in his poetry, but only after he had moved far away from St. Louis. During his years as an undergraduate at Harvard, Eliot published a number of poems in The Harvard Advocate, the school literary magazine. In 1910 he earned his master’s degree in philosophy. In the same year he completed his first important poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This poem was published in the magazine Poetry. He graduated from Harvard and went on to postgraduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris.
Just before the outbreak of World War I, Eliot took up residence in London, the city that would become his home for the rest of his life. There he worked for a time in a bank, suffered a nervous breakdown, married an emotionally troubled Englishwoman, and finally took up the business of literature. He became active as a publisher in the outstanding firm of Faber & Faber, and, on his own, edited The Criterion, a literary magazine. As a critic, he was responsible for reviving interest in many neglected poets, notably the seventeenth-century poet John Donne.
In 1927, Eliot gave up his American citizenship and became a subject of the King of England. But residence in an adopted country does not necessarily change the philosophy or the style of a poet.
Long before he decided to live abroad permanently, Eliot had developed a taste for classical literature. He was as familiar with European and Eastern writings as he was with the masterpieces of English. But the most crucial influence upon his early work came from the late-nineteenth-century French poets who, as a group, came to be known as the Symbolists. They saw poetry as an art of recreating states of mind and feeling, as opposed to reporting or confessing them. These beliefs became the basis of Eliot’s own poetic methods. When people complained that this poetic method of suggestion was complex and difficult to understand, Eliot retorted that poetry had to be complex to express the complexities of modern life. Eliot and other American poets also believed that, divorced from British antecedents, they would once and for all bring the peculiar rhythms of their native speech into the mainstream of world literature. Eliot and these other poets are often referred to as Modernists.
Eliot had an austere view of poetic creativity; he disagreed with those who regarded a poem as a means of self-expression, as a source of comfort, or as a kind of spiritual pep talk. Practicing what he preached, Eliot startled his contemporaries in 1917 with the poems Portrait of a Lady, Prufrock and Other Observations. These early poems were dramatic studies of man's spiritual and emotional poverty in a barren world. Then, in 1922, with the editorial advice and encouragement of Ezra Pound, Eliot published The Waste Land, a long work which would become the most significant poem of the early twentieth century. The poem was so influential that the word “wasteland” entered common usage from Eliot’s work. The word suggests a civilization that is spiritually empty and paralyzed by indecision and anxiety. The Waste Land proved that it was possible to write an epic poem of classical scope in the space of 434 lines. The poem contrasts the spiritual bankruptcy that Eliot saw as the dominant force in modern Europe with the values and unity that governed the past. Critics pored over the poem’s complex structure and its dense network of allusions to world literature, Oriental religion, and anthropology. The impact of The Waste Land on other writers, critics, and the public was enormous, and it is regarded as one of the finest literary works ever written.
A few years after The Waste Land appeared Eliot published a series of notes identifying many of his key references. In 1925, Eliot published a kind of lyrical post-script to The Waste Land called The Hollow Men, which predicted in its somber conclusion that the world would not end with a bang but with a whimper. In The Hollow Men, Eliot repeats and expands some of the themes of his longer poem and arrives at that point of despair beyond which lie but two alternatives: renewal or annihilation. Critics, surveying Eliot's career, said that, after the spiritual dead-end of The Hollow Men, Eliot chose hope over despair and faith over the world-weary cynicism that marked his early years. But there is much evidence in his later poems to indicate that, for Eliot, hope and faith were not conscious choices. Instead, they were the consequences of a submission. After he became a British citizen and the member of the Church of England, radical changes in the focus of Eliot’s writing, the exploration of religious themes became evident in his later poems Ash Wednesday (1930), with its deeply religious spiritual explorations, and Four Quartets, which contains the philosophical conclusions of a lifetime (though always tentative). These poems suggest that Eliot felt that religious belief could be a means of healing the wounds inflicted on a person by spiritually bankrupt society he depicted in The Waste Land. In such poetic dramas as Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Cocktail Party (1950), and The Confidential Clerk (1954), Pound affirmed a positive religious conviction that is sustaining.
Eliot spent the remainder of his poetic career in an extended meditation upon the limits of individual will and the limitless power of faith in the presence of grace.
Preludes
The winter evening settles down The morning comes to consciousness
With smell of steaks in passageways. Of faint stale smells of beer
Six o'clock From the sawdust-trampled street
The burnt-out ends of smoky days With all its muddy feet that press
And now a gusty shower wraps To early coffee-stands.
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet With the other masquerades
And newspapers from vacant lots; That time resumes,
The showers beat One thinks of all the hands
On broken blinds and chimney-pots, That are raising dingy shades
And at the corner of the street In a thousand furnished rooms.
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
You tossed a blanket from the bed, His soul stretched tight across the skies
You lay upon your back, and waited; That fade behind a city block,
You dozed, and watched the night revealing Or trampled by insistent feet
The thousand sordid images At four and five and six o'clock;
Of which your soul was constituted; And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
They flickered against the ceiling. And evening newspapers, and eyes
And when all the world came back Assured of certain certainties,
And the light crept up between the shutters, The conscience of a blackened street
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters, Impatient to assume the world.
You had such a vision of the street I am moved by fancies that are curled
As the street hardly understands; Around these images, and cling:
Sitting along the bed's edge, where The notion of some infinitely gentle
You curled the papers from your hair, Infinitely suffering things.
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet Wipe your hands across your mouth, and laugh;
In the palms of both soiled hands. The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
Cited for his work as “a trail-blazing pioneer of modern poetry”, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. In the decades that followed, he came frequently to the United States to lecture and to read his poems, sometimes to very large audiences.
Thomas Stearns Eliot’s poetry received more critical acclaim than that of any other American poet of his time. Several of T.S. Eliot’s plays had a successful run in London and New York.
Ezra Pound wrote a few final words on the death of his old friend, ending with this passage: “Am I to write ‘about’ the poet Thomas Stearns Eliot? Or my friend ‘the Possum’? Let him rest in peace, I can only repeat, but with the urgency of fifty years ago: READ HIM.”