Thomas
Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England
family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the
Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he
was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor
for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director.
He founded and, during the seventeen years of its publication (1922-1939),
edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion. In 1927, Eliot
became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican
Church.
Eliot has been
one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. Never
compromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has
followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation of the
complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation
necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite this difficulty his influence on
modern poetic diction has been immense. Eliot's poetry from Prufrock (1917) to
the Four Quartets (1943) reflects the development of a Christian writer: the
early work, especially The Waste Land (1922), is essentially negative, the
expression of that horror from which the search for a higher world arises. In
Ash Wednesday (1930) and the Four Quartets this higher world becomes more
visible; nonetheless Eliot has always taken care not to become a «religious
poet». and often belittled the power of poetry as a religious force. However,
his dramas Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939) are more
openly Christian apologies. In his essays, especially the later ones, Eliot
advocates a traditionalism in religion, society, and literature that seems at
odds with his pioneer activity as a poet. But although the Eliot of Notes
towards the Definition of Culture (1948) is an older man than the poet of The
Waste Land, it should not be forgotten that for Eliot tradition is a living
organism comprising past and present in constant mutual interaction. Eliot's
plays Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail
Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and TheElderStatesman(1959) were
published in one volume in 1962; Collected Poems 1909-62 appeared in
1963.