Unit 1: INTRODUCTION TO T. S. ELIOT
INTRODUCTION
Born on 26th September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American born English poet, essayist, playwright and literary critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest English poets and has served as a prominent influence on the course of modern literature. The critic Hugh Kenner remarked that “opinion concerning the most influential man of letters of the 20th century has not freed itself from a cloud of unknowing” [1] and called Eliot the ‘the invisible poet’. This was partly because of Eliot’s insistence on the poet’s impersonality and difficult nature of his work. Eliot also retreated from the idea of a biography because he did not want his writing to be read as …show more content…
S. Eliot studied at Smith Academy in St. Louis where he first began to write poetry and between the years of 1906 and 1910, attended Harvard College. It was here that the poet pursued a wide ranging course of studies in literature, the Classics, German and French literatures. While at Harvard, Eliot was heavily influenced by two of his teachers – Irving Babit and George Santayana whose moralizing and stylish scepticism gave him his sense of tradition. Around the year 1908, Eliot was introduced to the poetry of Jules Laforgue (whose use of ironic elegance and psychological tone gave his attempts at poetry a voice) and a book from the Harvard Union Library: Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1895) sparked his interest in the poetry of the French Symbolists such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire and …show more content…
It was at this time that Eliot’s marriage to his first wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood was failing and the poet was committed to a Swiss sanatorium to recuperate from a nervous disorder. In the same year, Eliot founded the quarterly journal Criterion and served as its editor till its end in 1939. He later joined the publishing house Faber & Faber where he remained for the rest of his career. Apart from writing poetry and serving as an editor for publishing houses and journals, Eliot also wrote a number of critical essays and philosophical reviews such as Traditional and Individual Talent that analyses other poets while carefully informs the readers about his own dispositions regarding the use of the “objective correlative” of symbolic, meaningful or chaotic imagery and his preference for poetry that disregards a poet’s own personality. In 1927, Eliot joined the Church of England and his subsequent work reflects his reoccupation with faith and religious issues and Anglican attitudes (such as the six part poem Ash Wednesday published in 1930, Four Quartets which were published individually over a period of six
INTRODUCTION
Born on 26th September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, Thomas Stearns Eliot was an American born English poet, essayist, playwright and literary critic. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest English poets and has served as a prominent influence on the course of modern literature. The critic Hugh Kenner remarked that “opinion concerning the most influential man of letters of the 20th century has not freed itself from a cloud of unknowing” [1] and called Eliot the ‘the invisible poet’. This was partly because of Eliot’s insistence on the poet’s impersonality and difficult nature of his work. Eliot also retreated from the idea of a biography because he did not want his writing to be read as …show more content…
S. Eliot studied at Smith Academy in St. Louis where he first began to write poetry and between the years of 1906 and 1910, attended Harvard College. It was here that the poet pursued a wide ranging course of studies in literature, the Classics, German and French literatures. While at Harvard, Eliot was heavily influenced by two of his teachers – Irving Babit and George Santayana whose moralizing and stylish scepticism gave him his sense of tradition. Around the year 1908, Eliot was introduced to the poetry of Jules Laforgue (whose use of ironic elegance and psychological tone gave his attempts at poetry a voice) and a book from the Harvard Union Library: Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1895) sparked his interest in the poetry of the French Symbolists such as Rimbaud, Baudelaire and …show more content…
It was at this time that Eliot’s marriage to his first wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood was failing and the poet was committed to a Swiss sanatorium to recuperate from a nervous disorder. In the same year, Eliot founded the quarterly journal Criterion and served as its editor till its end in 1939. He later joined the publishing house Faber & Faber where he remained for the rest of his career. Apart from writing poetry and serving as an editor for publishing houses and journals, Eliot also wrote a number of critical essays and philosophical reviews such as Traditional and Individual Talent that analyses other poets while carefully informs the readers about his own dispositions regarding the use of the “objective correlative” of symbolic, meaningful or chaotic imagery and his preference for poetry that disregards a poet’s own personality. In 1927, Eliot joined the Church of England and his subsequent work reflects his reoccupation with faith and religious issues and Anglican attitudes (such as the six part poem Ash Wednesday published in 1930, Four Quartets which were published individually over a period of six