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Portrait of T. S. Eliot

Literature · Poets

T. S. Eliot

1888–1965 · American-born British

Modernism

Thomas Stearns Eliot, born in St Louis, Missouri, settled in England and became the central poet and critic of Anglo-American modernism. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and The Waste Land transformed English poetry with their fragmented, allusive style, while his later Four Quartets reflect his Anglican faith. He also wrote verse dramas such as Murder in the Cathedral and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

How to spot them

  • ▸"April is the cruellest month" (opening of The Waste Land); "not with a bang but a whimper"
  • ▸J. Alfred Prufrock measuring out his life with coffee spoons
  • ▸Born in St Louis; worked at Lloyds Bank and then as a director of Faber and Faber
  • ▸Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the basis for the musical Cats

Key works

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

Dramatic monologue of a timid, ageing man; published in Poetry magazine and in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)

The Waste Land (1922)

Fragmented five-part modernist poem of post-war spiritual desolation, edited by Ezra Pound

The Hollow Men (1925)

Bleak poem ending with the world closing 'Not with a bang but a whimper'

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

His first major poem after joining the Church of England, on spiritual struggle and conversion

Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

Verse drama on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, first staged in Canterbury Cathedral chapter house

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Light verse featuring Macavity, Growltiger and others; adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber as Cats (1981)

Four Quartets (1943)

Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages and Little Gidding: meditations on time and faith

The Cocktail Party (1949)

Verse comedy with a religious theme, a West End and Broadway success

Key ideas

  • Impersonality in poetry, set out in the essay 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919)
  • The 'objective correlative': emotion expressed through a set of objects or events (essay on Hamlet, 1919)
  • Collage of allusion, quotation and multiple voices as a method for modern poetry

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in St Louis, Missouri; educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Merton College, Oxford
  • •Became a British subject and was received into the Church of England in 1927
  • •Worked at Lloyds Bank in London before joining the publisher Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber)
  • •Ezra Pound cut The Waste Land heavily; Eliot dedicated it to him as 'il miglior fabbro' ('the better craftsman')
  • •Founded and edited the literary journal The Criterion (1922–1939), in which The Waste Land first appeared
  • •Won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Order of Merit in 1948
  • •First wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood (the film Tom & Viv); married his secretary Valerie Fletcher in 1957
  • •His ashes lie in St Michael's Church, East Coker, Somerset, the village of his ancestors
  • •The T. S. Eliot Prize for poetry is named after him

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources