|
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, T. S. Eliot was educated at
Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford. World War I prevented his
returning to Harvard to defend his thesis, and he settled
in London, where he worked as a teacher and in the foreign
department of Lloyds Bank while writing poetry and literary
essays in his free time. Eliot was championed by Ezra Pound,
who introduced him to literary circles, commented on his drafts,
and helped him with his finances. Although Eliot had written
traditional poetry as a student, after reading about the French
symbolist poets in Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement
in Literature, he reconceived his style, composing poems
like "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and
"Preludes" (both 1915), which are representative
of what is now called "high modernism." His early
poetry, such as The Waste Land (1922),
critiques modern civilization through a series of multiple
voices and characters, literary and historical allusions,
fragments of myth and history, and vignettes of contemporary
life; his later work explores the difficult process of searching
for faith and reconciliation. With the advent of World War
II, Eliot distanced himself from politics and, through essays
such as "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919,
1920), advanced an apolitical approach to poetry: poems should
be considered in relation to other poems and in terms of their
own structures. Eliot also composed verse plays, including
Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Cocktail
Party (1949), and The Elder Statesman (1959),
and he founded Criterion, a little magazine that
was published from 1922 to 1939. Eliot won the Nobel Prize
for literature in 1948. His poems are collected in Collected
Poems, 1909-1962 (1963).
|
