Thomas Stearns Eliot, an American-born scholar, sophisticated eclectic, and poetic genius claimed by both the United States and England, is the twentieth century’s touchstone author and critic. His monumental verse, written during a period of emotional turmoil and personal re-evaluation, gave voice to the post–World War I trauma that left a generation in doubt about the future of civilization. His style transcended previous literary movements with a surprising sense of humor. Both frustratingly obtuse and dazzlingly memorable, his masterworks redirect attention from the collapse of Edwardian respectability to the birth of modernism.
It seems inconceivable that so British a poet could be an American Midwesterner. The seventh son of brick maker Henry Ware Eliot and poet and biographer Charlotte Stearns, Tom Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. His distinguished intellectual family derived from immigrants from East Coker, Somersetshire, a setting that Eliot returns to in his poetry. After completing studies at Smith Academy and a year at Milton Academy, he turned his back on America and cultivated the air, grace, and mannerisms of a London dandy.
Heavily influenced by Irving Babbitt at Harvard, Eliot earned a B.A. in literature and an M.A. in philosophy and Sanskrit, all in four years. To increase his fluency in French, he studied for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, then returned to Harvard for doctoral work in philosophy. Eliot had traveled in Germany and begun a doctoral dissertation at Merton College, Oxford, when he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. As World War I engulfed Europe, health problems kept him out of the army.
After Eliot’s father altered his will to underscore disappointment in his son’s marriage, Ezra Pound influenced Eliot to remain in the British Isles and join the Bloomsbury Circle, a powerful intellectual force in England in the 1920s and 1930s. Following brief teaching stints at High Wycombe and Highgate Junior School, from 1919 to 1922, he worked for Lloyds Bank and began submitting verse of subtle brilliance to magazines. His poems departed from the modish romantics to concentrate on the mystic outlook of the metaphysics and the Christian divines.
Forever done with teaching and money handling, Eliot entered the book world for life as director of publisher Faber & Faber. He distinguished himself with a remarkable first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), followed by Ara vos prec (1920) and The Sacred Wood (1922). Immediately, he began composing two controversial works, The Waste Land (1922), winner of The Dial award, and The Hollow Men (1925), a profound verse of postwar malaise and a prime influence on the “lost generation.” Among scholarly successes were Three Critical Essays (1920), Andrew Marvell (1922), and The Criterion, a literary quarterly he published and edited from 1923 to 1939. He received British citizenship in 1927 and sought baptism and confirmation in the Church of England. In 1932, he returned temporarily to the United States as Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton poetry professor and undertook a series of lectures on U.S. campuses.
A period of Anglo-Catholic thought influenced Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi (1927), Ash Wednesday (1930), and The Four Quartets (1943), a war commentary begun in 1935. He exercised versatility in a melodrama, Sweeney Agonistes (1932), and two stage works: The Rock (1934), a pageant with choruses, and Murder in the Cathedral (1935). The latter, a poetic drama commemorating a significant act of violence perpetrated by Henry II, was performed on the site of the assassination of Bishop Thomas à Becket at Canterbury Cathedral’s Chapter House.
Subsequent works displaying Eliot’s piety and religious philosophy include The Family Reunion (1939), The Idea of a Christian Society (1940), and The Cocktail Party (1950), the most successful of his stage dramas. A lighter work, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1940), is the basis for Cats, the longest-running production in stage musical history. Less noteworthy are The Confidential Clerk (1954) and The Elder Statesman (1958), both more suited to reading than to acting. Lauded as English literature’s most incisive critic, Eliot surveyed a range of interests with Homage to Dryden (1924), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Elizabeth Essays (1934), and On Poetry and Poets (1957).
In 1948, Eliot received the Nobel Prize for literature for his erudite treatment of modern sterility. He died in 1965; his ashes were interred in the village church of East Coker, the ancestral home of the Eliot family.
