T. S. Eliot

(1888–1965)

When I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the “disillusionment of a generation, ” which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention.

(T. S. Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth”)

As an American who became a British citizen, T. S. Eliot has been claimed by both countries as part of their literary canon. Although best known for his poetry, Eliot was also a successful playwright and an extremely prolific writer of prose, in the forms of critical essays, reviews, and lectures. Eliot was a key figure in the literary movement of modernism. He became known as perhaps the most prominent man of letters of his day and was presented with many honors, including 14 honorary degrees, the British Order of Merit, the Presidential Order of Freedom, and the Nobel Prize. In 1956 he lectured to 14, 000 people in a baseball stadium at the University of Minnesota, in the largest assembly ever gathered to attend a literary lecture.

Although the commonly held image of Eliot is that he was isolated and even a bit snobbish, with a formal and stiff exterior, he was described by those who knew him well as calm, generous, kind, and always deeply contemplative. Eliot wanted, paradoxically, to be “a poet who, out of intense and personal experience, is able to express a general truth”, and much of his writing can best be understood as a sort of spiritual autobiography; Eliot used his poetry and prose to grapple with the intellectual and personal issues facing him throughout his life.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. The Eliot family at the time of his birth was socially prominent. Although his grandfather, the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, died the year before Eliot’s birth, his legacy remained very important in the family; Eliot’s mother stressed his ideals of self-denial and public service. Eliot’s father, Henry, was a successful manufacturer, and his mother, Charlotte, was a poet, mainly writing optimistic and didactic religious verse. Growing up with much older siblings, and with a congenital hernia that led his mother to forbid sports, Eliot had few playmates and spent a lot of his time reading (Poe became a favorite). During his childhood, the family spent summers at Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and Eliot loved the seashore. His schoolboy writings reflect the glory and heroism of the fisherman, and he once said he thought of himself as a New England poet.

Despite growing up in a Unitarian family, Eliot was not convinced by this faith, as he believed that true salvation should result from individual human effort rather than divine will. The question of true religious belief was one that would continue to trouble Eliot, and this religious questioning is reflected in many of his early poems.

Eliot attended Smith Academy, a prep school in St. Louis, where in January 1899 he brought out eight issues of his own magazine. He later claimed he knew he wanted to become a poet after reading Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of The Rubá iyá t of Omar Khayyá m at about age 14. He spent a year at Milton Academy just outside Boston before enrolling at Harvard in fall 1906.

While at Harvard, Eliot became disillusioned with the decaying upper-class Boston society in which he was expected to play a part; despite connections with family members in the inner circles of this society, he felt detached from it, although he did take up aspects of its character, including “its rigid manners, its loss of vigour, its estrangement from so many areas of life, [and] its painful self-consciousness”. He preferred time spent wandering the slums of Roxbury and North Cambridge to that at cocktail parties and social events. He was known as a bit of a recluse during his time at Harvard, but he did attend some social functions and joined the staff of the Harvard Advocate, a literary magazine to which he contributed some early poems.

One of the key intellectual influences of Eliot’s early years was the 19th-century French poet Jules Laforgue, whom he fi rst encountered in December 1908 in a book by Arthur Symons called The Symbolist Movement in Literature. He was struck by the idea of a growing interest in consciousness described by Symons, and he seems to have taken from Laforgue in particular the technique of free verse (which Laforgue developed in 1885) and the “willfully defeatist figure” that was at the center of his poems after reading Laforgue. This defeatist figure appears in Eliot’s first successful poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, ” which he began writing while at Harvard and was first published in 1915.

Eliot’s decision to go to Paris after graduation from Harvard in 1910 was not really supported by his family, and many of the poems he wrote during this year are rejections of family and Boston life. He spent nine months at the Sorbonne and was disillusioned as quickly as he had been in Boston. He found the city drab and boring and the people apathetic and again spent time “slumming.” One important influence during his time in Paris was the philosopher Henri Bergson, whose ideas about duration—the subjective and continuous lived experience of time—would figure in Eliot’s later work. Since Paris had not provided him with the poetic inspiration he was seeking, Eliot decided to return to Harvard for graduate study in philosophy.

There, Eliot spent some time studying Indian philosophy, although he eventually focused on the work of F. H. Bradley. In his dissertation on Bradley’s Appearance and Reality (1893), Eliot examined ideas about subjective experience and perception and the impossibility of grasping absolute truth. Although he did finish his dissertation in 1916, Eliot was never awarded his Ph.D. because he did not return to Harvard to defend his dissertation.

Another key influence on Eliot during this time (and throughout the rest of his poetic career) was the poetry of Dante. He found Dante’s narration of his journey through the inferno extremely relevant to his own struggles with religious faith in modern life. Eliot wrote a group of religious poems in 1914, dealing with topics such as martyrdom and sainthood, which were never published, but he did not feel satisfied with his poetry during this period.

In 1912 Eliot met Emily Hale, and, although they never married, his relationship with Emily became probably the most important of his life. Many of the details of the relationship of Eliot and Emily are unknown and will remain so until the release of her letters in 2019. In later writings Eliot claimed that before he left for Europe in 1914 he told Emily he was in love with her, and he suggested that he had been rejected. Little is known about any contact they may have had between his departure and the time when their relationship was revived in the 1930s.

Eliot decided in 1914 to spend more time abroad and was awarded a fellowship at Oxford. He planned to spend the summer in Germany, but when war broke out, he moved to London in August and then on to Oxford, where he stayed until June 1915. Oxford during this time was very quiet, with many British young men fighting in the war, but Eliot did meet two very important influences during this year: Ezra Pound and Vivienne Haigh-Wood.

Eliot initially impressed Pound by showing him “Prufrock, ” and Pound became a key supporter of Eliot’s fledgling poetic career. He encouraged Eliot to remain in London, arguing that poetry from America was not taken seriously in London. Pound turned Eliot firmly toward poetry at a time when he was leaning toward a career as a philosophy professor, and he remained an important “sponsor.” Pound also introduced Eliot into literary circles in London.

Eliot met Vivienne (called Vivien) Haigh-Wood, a governess working in Cambridge, in early 1915. They shared an interest in writing, and he was attracted to her adventurousness and quick wit. After the end of the term at Oxford in June, Eliot faced the important decision of whether to return to Harvard and the life of a professor or to stay in London and continue to write poetry. Pound’s advice was apparently extremely influential, and, for Eliot, marrying Vivien seemed to be necessarily related to a decision to stay in London. They were married suddenly, on June 26, 1915, without the knowledge of either set of parents. The marriage, although it lasted for many years, was by all accounts a failure, and a trial for both of them. Vivien was chronically ill and often mentally unstable, and these problems exacerbated Eliot’s own nervous condition.

Eliot was also relatively isolated socially during this period in London. He attempted to enlist in the U.S. Navy but was rejected because of his health problems and as a result was one of the few young men of his generation to be “left out” of World War I. He and Vivien were somewhat adrift in London society. Through Bertrand Russell, who had been a mentor to him at Harvard, Eliot became acquainted with Clive Bell, Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, and other members of the Bloomsbury group, but he did not really fit in with them. They were put off by his proper manners and ostentatious displays of learning. He did eventually, though, develop a friendship with Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, whose Hogarth Press published a book of seven of his poems in 1919. This, combined with the 1917 publication of Prufrock and Other Observations, established Eliot as a poet in the eyes of London literary society.

During the initial period after his marriage, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, but he was not really suited to this position and did not enjoy it. During the fall and winter of 1916 and 1917 he also gave lectures on English and French literature in London. Eliot began working at Lloyd’s Bank in 1917 and did enjoy the regular work of a banker. He was also extremely busy writing reviews for various journals. In 1922 he became the editor of a new literary review (the Criterion) financed by Lady Rothermere, the wife of a newspaper owner. All of these responsibilities, which he took very seriously, left him very little free time to write poetry. The continuous stresses of life in London, particularly his marriage to Vivien, led to a nervous breakdown. He spent several months in 1921 in a sanatorium in Lausanne, Switzerland, where his health did in fact improve, and where he was also able to find time to devote to his writing. On his way back he passed through Paris and left The Waste Land with Pound, who was to have a substantial effect on the poem’s revision. The Waste Land was published in October and November 1922 in the Criterion.

By 1923 Eliot was ready to leave the bank, but Vivien’s continually worsening health meant that he needed financial stability. He had to turn down the editorship of the literary journal the Nation because the owners were unable to give him enough of a financial guarantee. The years between 1923 and 1925 were extremely trying, and the Eliots struggled financially. By 1925 Eliot knew he needed a major change. His first thought was to leave his wife, as it was clear by then that their marriage was a complete failure. Vivien’s condition grew worse, no doubt at least in part as a result of side effects of the drugs she was prescribed. In September 1925 Eliot convinced Geoffrey Faber to give him a job at his new publishing house, Faber & Gwyer, and his Poems 1909–1925 was published in November. He threw himself into the work of the publisher, reading and commenting on works from prospective writers. As a director of Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber), Eliot was in constant contact with the literary scene. Under Eliot, Faber launched the careers of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and Ted Hughes, as well as publishing works by already established figures such as Ezra Pound and James Joyce.

This career change certainly affected Eliot greatly, but the major change to his life in this period was his religious conversion. He met William Force Stead, a poet and Anglican minister, who became his confidant, in 1923. Eliot was baptized into the Church of England in June 1927 and, in November, became a British citizen. After his conversion, Eliot regularly attended Mass, and he became a warden of St. Stephen’s Church in 1934, serving in this capacity for 25 years.

In the late 1920s Eliot began once again to correspond with Emily Hale and probably spent time with her when she visited London during the summers. She became for him an ideal of womanly purity, as well as a nostalgic reminder of New England. Eliot’s nostalgia increased after his mother’s death in 1929 and eventually led to his acceptance of the Norton Professorship at Harvard in 1932. In the winter of 1932–33, Eliot took the train across the country to visit Emily Hale, who was then teaching at Scripps College in Claremont, California. This meeting, and his happiness at being surrounded by family while in Cambridge, left him feeling torn between England and the United States and helped him make up his mind finally to request a deed of separation from Vivien. When he returned to England that summer, he kept his address secret in order to evade Vivien, who refused to accept their separation and in fact never signed the papers. Eliot thought of this period as a sort of “new life, ” the most important aspect of which was that Emily Hale came to England on a year’s leave beginning in late summer 1934. They spent a great deal of time together, including a trip to Burnt Norton (an old house and accompanying garden, unoccupied at the time of their visit). Eliot’s poem of the same name (1935) is often read as a re-creation of a transcendent experience.

Eliot’s guilt over his “abandonment” of Vivien, however, left him unable to make a commitment to Emily, who returned to New England and accepted a post at Smith College in 1936. She did continue to visit England each year until 1939, when the outbreak of World War II forced her to stay in America. The deep-seated tension and turmoil Eliot felt about his relationship with Vivien were dramatized in his play The Family Reunion, in which many of his close friends were able to recognize the main character as the playwright. Vivien never stopped feeling abandoned by Eliot, and she began to suspect a conspiracy that allegedly hid him from her. When she was found wandering the streets in 1938, her brother signed the papers to have her placed in a mental institution. While Eliot did not take an active part in her confinement, he made no objection and even arranged to have Vivien’s income cover the cost. He never visited her, and she died in the institution on January 23, 1947.

Vivien’s death in 1947, which should have left him free to marry Emily Hale (as she and everyone else had been assuming would happen for the previous 15 years), instead caused Eliot what he called a “catastrophe” when he realized that, although he loved Emily, he did not want to marry her. A version of this conflict is dramatized in his play The Cocktail Party. He felt that he had “lost his passion” and seemed to his friends to age quite a bit in this short time. He and Emily carried on the pattern of their relationship (mostly through letters, with occasional visits) for another 10 years, and he continued to send her copies of all his works. She clearly took comfort in the familiar routine, and she therefore suffered an emotional breakdown when he married again in January 1957. His marriage was not the only betrayal; at this point Eliot broke off all correspondence with Emily as well. It seems that he destroyed her letters to him; hers have been placed in the Princeton University library with instructions that they are not to be opened until 50 years after the death of the survivor (in 2019).

Eliot’s Four Quartets, written in 1940–42 (except Burnt Norton, written in 1935), explore the intersection of time and timelessness. The quartets can be seen as autobiographical, conveying unity and circularity, and it seems likely that Eliot intended these poems as his final ones. After his publication of the Quartets, Eliot became perhaps England’s predominant poet and was extremely well known, even among the general public. He was in great demand and made many appearances, especially after winning the Nobel Prize in 1948. However, despite his public profile and popularity, Eliot was quite isolated. He spent much of his time either working or alone in the dark rooms of the fl at he shared with his friend John Hayward, and even his closest friends were not privy to his inner thoughts.

Eliot’s marriage to his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, in January 1957 took everyone who knew him by surprise. Valerie was 30 (Eliot was 68), and she had admired and felt a connection with the poet since first hearing his poetry as a girl. After his marriage, Eliot withdrew from the few friends he had at the time, but by all accounts he was extremely happy, and the Eliots lived in a very loving and devoted marriage until his death of emphysema in January 1965. Since his death, Valerie has devoted the rest of her life to preserving Eliot’s papers, editing his works, and compiling his letters. According to Eliot’s wishes, after his death he was cremated and his ashes were buried at East Coker, in Somerset, England, from which Andrew Eliot had traveled to Boston in 1670. His burial thus effectively returned him to the place of his ancestors.