Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965
from Literature Online biography

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), American-British poet, critic and dramatist, is among the most celebrated literary figures of the twentieth century. Although best known for his poetry, Eliot wrote several influential verse dramas, including The Cocktail Party (which won a Tony Award), Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion . Eliot is recognised as a daring innovator whose poetry and criticism helped to shape modernism, and also as an impassioned defender of the literary tradition. Eliot received the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in Saint Louis, Missouri, the youngest of seven children of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte (Stearns) Eliot. Eliot's father, a successful businessman, came from a respected New England family, and his mother was a socially conscious teacher and an amateur poet. Eliot was educated at private schools, and he earned a BA (1909) and an MA (1910) in philosophy at Harvard, where he continued his postgraduate work while intermittently studying abroad. He had already written some of his important early poems when, in 1914, he travelled to England for a year at Oxford. Eliot's life then took a dramatic turn when he impulsively married the vivacious Vivienne Haigh-Wood. The marriage led to Eliot's estrangement from his family and to a variety of personal and practical difficulties, due in part to his wife's apparent mental instability. Eliot began teaching in a London grammar school and then in 1917 took a position at Lloyds Bank.

During this period Eliot gained introduction to the British intellectual elite, including the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the poet Ezra Pound . Pound funded publication of Eliot's first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). Quickly recognised as an important new voice, Eliot became assistant editor of the Egoist , an avant-garde literary journal, and in 1920 he published a second volume of poems and a first volume of criticism. The nervous strain of his domestic situation continued, however, and in 1921 Eliot took a rest cure that unexpectedly resulted in the completion of his most famous work: the long, complex, and daring five-part poem The Waste Land . It was published in 1922, and that same year Eliot founded Criterion , a quarterly that became influential in the Modernist movement.

In 1925 Eliot resigned from his job at Lloyds to become literary editor of the London publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber). His first play appeared in Criterion in two parts: 'Fragment of a Prologue' (1926) and 'Fragment of an Agon' (1927). Although it was never finished, the work was subsequently published as Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama (1932).

In 1927 Eliot became a British citizen, joined the Anglican Church, and began to shift his work in a more explicitly Christian direction. By this time he was an established literary figure, and he continued to publish new poems and criticism. His next dramatic work, The Rock , did not appear until 1934, when it was composed for special performance as a church pageant. The following year Eliot was asked to write a play for presentation at Canterbury Cathedral as part of a festival, and the result was Murder in the Cathedral (1935). This intense and innovative verse drama explores the spiritual conflicts of Thomas Becket as he is visited by tempters and is finally martyred, while a chorus illuminates the play's narrative action with commentaries.

Murder in the Cathedral is very different from Sweeney Agonistes , which is often described as a 'jazz play', with echoes of music hall rhythms and a bleak perspective characteristic of Eliot's early poetry. Both works, however, employ structures of Greek drama and incorporate layers of mythic allusion, setting a pattern for the rest of Eliot's plays.

In spite of its unconventional structure and sometimes difficult dialogue, Murder in the Cathedral proved unexpectedly successful and moved to a London theatre, where it ran for several months. Public interest in the play encouraged Eliot's belief that theatre could provide an important means of communication between the modern poet and the larger community. He explored this possibility in his next two plays, which take place in ordinary social settings. The Family Reunion (1939), written partly in blank verse and partly in prose, portrays a complex drama of guilt and expiation; like its predecessors it combines classical and modern elements, drawing on both Euripides and Noel Coward . Audiences and critics found the play baffling, and Eliot later delivered his own critique (in a 1951 lecture at Harvard), calling the action badly paced and the protagonist 'an insufferable prig'.

Nevertheless The Family Reunion has occasionally been revived and is regarded as an important step in the evolution of Eliot's later work, both as a poet and as a playwright. His most successful play, The Cocktail Party , was produced ten years later, in 1949, and achieved a more effective integration of Greek elements (borrowed from Euripides ) with the conventions of the modern stage. The play at first appears to be a satire of the drawing room comedy but gradually reveals more serious themes as it explores the disintegrating marriage of the party's hosts. A psychiatrist helps the couple to accept the limitations of their relationship and resume the marriage, while the husband's mistress goes on to find redemption as a Christian martyr in Africa.

The dated themes of The Cocktail Party present difficulties for contemporary audiences, but the original production ran on Broadway for 409 performances and won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. Eliot's next play, The Confidential Clerk (1953), has received little critical attention, but it enjoyed a strong run in London and was a New York Times bestseller. Although serious themes underlie the comic action, an entertaining plot and witty dialogue give the play an enjoyable character.

In addition to his poetry and plays, Eliot produced a large body of important critical writing. Among the most significant volumes of his prose are The Sacred Wood (1920), For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), The Idea of a Christian Society (1940), and Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948).

During the Second World War, Eliot continued to write poetry, culminating in Four Quartets (1943), a suite of meditations on love, war and memory. After the war, however, he wrote only essays and plays. His final play, The Elder Statesman (1958), followed much the same formula as his earlier works, though with a markedly elegiac quality. It had only a modest run and is not considered one of his important works.

Eliot's first wife (from whom he had long been separated but never divorced) died in 1947, but he did not remarry until 1957, when he wed Esme Valerie Fletcher. His final years were lived quietly, although he wrote a few short pieces, including a study of the metaphysical poet George Herbert . Eliot died in London on 4 January 1965.

In addition to his Nobel Prize, Eliot's many honours include an Order of Merit (1948), a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and a Tony Award (both 1950) for The Cocktail Party , a Hanseatic Goethe Prize (1955), a Dante Gold Medal (1959), an Emerson-Thoreau Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1959), and a Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964).

It would be difficult to overstate the importance attributed to Eliot in his lifetime, and he is still regarded as a seminal figure in twentieth-century English literature. Eliot's fame rests mainly on his reputation as a principle architect of Modernism and on his two very different masterworks, The Waste Land and Four Quartets . Eliot turned to drama in his maturity, and his plays have attracted critical attention more for their place in Eliot's creative and spiritual journey than for their intrinsic literary qualities. They nevertheless enjoyed some theatrical success and contributed to a mid-century revival of verse drama.

Collections that provide a helpful overview of Eliot criticism include T.S. Eliot: A Collection of Essays (1962; edited by Hugh Kenner ), The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot (1994; edited by Anthony David Moody) and Critical Companion to T.S. Eliot: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (2007; edited by Russell E. Murphy).

Resources that focus on Eliot's work as a dramatist include Carol H. Smith's T.S. Eliot's Dramatic Theory and Practice, from 'Sweeney Agonistes' to 'The Elder Statesman' (1963), E. Martin Browne's The Making of T.S. Eliot's Plays (1969), and David R. Clark's Twentieth-Century Interpretations of 'Murder in the Cathedral': A Collection of Critical Essays (1971).

The most important archives of Eliot's papers are held in the Eliot Collection of the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and in the Hayward Collection of King's College Library at Cambridge University.

JH , 2009