T. S. Eliot

From Philosopedia

- 19-year-old Harvard undergrad Eliot

Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888—1965)

T. S. Eliot, an Anglo-Catholic supernaturalist and American-English poet and critic, was born in St. Louis, Missouri.

At Harvard, where between 1907 and 1910 his poetry was published in the Harvard Advocate, he received such low grades his first year that he was placed on probation.

James E. Mills Jr.'s T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet (Penn State) describes Eliot's partying with Boston's bohemian demimonde, especially liking Isabella Stewart Gardner's Venetian-style villa near the Boston Fens, where aesthetes and uncloseted "Uranians" - as gays were then called - hung out. One of his earliest surviving poems, dating from 1909, is "First Caprice in North Cambridge:

A street-piano, garrulous and frail;

The yellow evening flung against the panes

Of dirty windows; and the distant strains

Of children's voices, ending in a wail.

Bottles and broken glass,

Trampled mud and grass;

And a crowd of tattered sparrows

Delve in the gutter with sordid patience.

Oh, these minor considerations! . . .

In 1910 and 1911 in Paris, while he studied at the Sorbonne, Eliot is said to have had a homosexual relationship with Jean Verdenal (1889—1915), who died in battle, after which in 1917 Eliot hurriedly married his first wife, Vivien. In 1927, Eliot espoused Anglo-Catholicism, turning from spiritual desolation to hope for human salvation, accepting religious faith as a solution to the human dilemma.

Succeeding greatly as a writer, he became the assistant editor of the Egoist (1917—1919).

The poet, critic, and playwright who moved from being a naturalist to a neo-classical humanist had been persuaded by Ezra Pound to stay in Oxford, after which he became a teacher and worked in a bank before becoming a director of Faber publishers. Bertrand Russell, who introduced him into the Bloomsbury Circle, described Eliot as ...

• although impeccable in his tastes but has no vigor or life.

Wags described him as the Missouri chap who became "more Bwitish than the Bwitish."

Certainly his reputation increased considerably with his publishing Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Four Quartets (1944), and a series of plays, notably Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktal Party (1950). His Prufrock and Other Observations and The Wasteland received particularly critical acclaim, expressing as they did the anguish and barrenness of modern life and the isolation of the individual, particularly as reflected in the failure of love.

In 1948, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

“It’s clear that T. S. Eliot was by nature dour,” a Harvard psychologist, Dr. Jerome Kagan, has said. The observation was also made in the 1940s by H. Willard Reninger who, at a conference meeting where Eliot had just entered, wryly reported that the room temperature dropped ten degrees. Reninger, however, was an Eliot fan up until the time Eliot moved from his earlier naturalism to an Anglican supernaturalism.

Ezra Pound, as editor of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), recommended cutting the poem “Saint Narcissus,” which Gregory Woods of the Nottingham Trent University in England has described as “that peculiar fusion of pagan and Christian imagery that now appears at the end of the Complete Poems. Woods noted that Hart Crane, among others, assumed that Eliot was homosexual. Eliot’s love for Verdenal is said to be “one of the central facts” of the work, with the so-called Hyacinth girl of the poem’s opening section being the poet’s sentimental memory of “a friend coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac.” The figure, like Verdenal, dies in a trench, which Eliot describes as, “He who was living is now dead.”

Anthony Julius, in T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996), depicted Eliot as an anti-Semite whose anti-Semitism is integral to his poetry. “Anti-Semitism,” Julius wrote, “did not disfigure Eliot’s work, it animated it. It was, on occasion, both his refuge and his inspiration, and his exploitation of its literary potential was virtuous.” An example, which manages to insult both Jews (many of whom lived in a North London suburb, Golders Green) and blacks:

Bolo’s big black bastard queen

Was so obscene

She shocked the folk of

Golder’s Green.

In an essay collection, After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot wrote that “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large numbers of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” In later editions he withdrew the statement. {See entry for his Unitarian mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot; CE; James Wood, “After Strange Gods,” The New Republic, 29 July 1996; GL}