Greg's+Notes

A Brief Introduction to the Writing of T.S. Eliot

[Eliot photo] T.S. Eliot is remembered by scholars and students of literature for his rendering of the modern human psyche in erudite, innovative, and challenging poetic forms. He easily assimilated French Symbolists, Renaissance dramatists, classical mythology, the Bible and twentieth-century anxiety to create poetry that was both of the present and the past.

[Ezra Pound photo] Eliot entered the literary arena in September 1914 with his introduction to the cantankerous star-maker, Ezra Pound, a fellow poet and friend of nearly every major literary figure in the Modernist period (Ackroyd 55). At Pound's behest, Eliot's first major poem was published: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." [text of Prufrock] The poem is a visit into the indecisive and self-depricating mind of a gentleman as he questions whether or not to reveal his romantic feelings to a woman before it's too late: "Do I dare/ Disturb the universe?/ In a minute there is time/ For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse." [Prufrock and Other Observations] "Prufrock" was again published in 1917 as the booklet "Prufrock and Other Observations" with the addition of other poems such as "Portrait of a Lady," "Preludes," and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." Like "Prufrock," these other poems explore the paralyzed minds of middle-class men and woman who fail to develop meaningful relationships.

[Eliot photo 2] After the success of "Prufrock," Eliot's second collection entitled //Poems// was released in 1920. In true Eliot fashion, these poems are highly allusive, several are written in French, and most use esoteric vocabulary: one poem begins with the word "Polyphiloprogenitive," meaning extremely prolific. //Poems// also introduced a recurring character, the philanderer Sweeney, who appears in several of Eliot's later poems.

[Eliot typing] In between writing poetry, Eliot was building his reputation as a prolific literary critic. In 1920, Eliot released "The Sacred Wood," an essay compilation that included commentary on Restoration drama, Dante, Victorian poetry, and two of his most famous essays, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet and his Problems." [Eliot looking at camera] In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot acknowledges the omniprescence and influence of the great poets of history on contemporary art. He gives the moniker of 'The Tradition" to the bibliography of immortal writers stretching back to Homer. In "Hamlet and his Problems," Eliot brought the term "objective correlative," the invocation of a specific emotion in a reader through a deliberately chosen imagery or narrative, into popular use. Both the literary tradition and the objective correlative would be used by Eliot to great effect in his next and most lauded poem, //The Waste Land//.

//[wasteland picture] The Waste Land// is a consummation of Eliot's major themes, form, and images in a modern epic poem. The piece can be seen as an elegy for the vivacious, pagan world and the dominance of a mechanical, soulless, mentally shattered society. Presented in a series of fragments, //The Waste Land// connects infertile, paralyzed, and zombified personas not through traditional poetic convention, but by building a web of images that unify its disparate pieces with a common theme. [Guy Fawkes pic?] Eliot followed up //The Waste Land// in 1925 with "The Hollow Men," a poem that also explores similar ideas about infertility. The hollow men of the title could be imagined as inhabitants of the waste land. They are characters stuffed with straw, like Prufrock, unable to act, and doomed to fade out of existence with a whimper.

[Ash Wednesday pic] The preoccupation with social banality and life-in-death, however, was substituted soon after 1927 for contrite, religious verse when Eliot was baptized in the Church of England. "Ash Wednesday," published in 1930, can be seen as an extended rumination on the possibility of redemption. It reads, "And pray to God to have mercy upon us/ And I pray that I may forget/ These matters that with myself I too much discuss/ Too much explain/ Because I do not hope to turn again/ Let these words answer/ For what is done, not to be done again/ May the judgement not be too heavy upon us." [St. Michael's] There is obvious Christian influence in its language and its title, taken from the beginning on Lent in the Christian calendar, significantly a period of fasting and prayer. Some of Eliot's most popular work continues in this same vain, such as "The Journey of the Magi," a monologue given by one of the three wise men recalling the journey to Bethlehem, and //Murder at the Cathedral//, a verse drama reenacting the martyrdom of Thomas Becket.

[Four Quartets pic] T.S. Eliot's last major poetic work, //Four Quartets,// is a set of four poems, which he considered to be his finest. Like "Ash Wednesday," it explores themes of time and mankind's redemption through the motifs of past, present, and future. [Text of poem] The first section, "Burnt Norton," begins, "Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/ And time future contained in time past./ If all time is eternally present/ All time is unredeemable." It is a poem concerned both with the immutability of the past and the possibilities of the future.

[Eliot pic] In Eliot's future, he went to write several plays for Broadway, such as //The Family Reunion// and //The Cocktail Party//, which received warm reviews. He was awarded the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in literature for his contributions to English verse. [Eliot pic] Although Eliot's poems were few, they enjoy great literary recognition and longevity. Several of his poems, such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and //The Waste Land,//are synonymous with British Modernism. In looking at the hopeless personage of Prufrock, to the redemptive poems "The Waste Land" and "Four Quartets" to his plays exploring filial tension, Eliot revealed the spiritual barrenness of the twentieth-century man and his quest for salvation. This unending search for life in a lifeless world haunts Eliot's long and diverse literary career, and may remind us of some of his final words in //Four Quartets://  We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.