Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns) (1888-1965)

US-born poet, playwright, and critic, who lived in England from 1915. His first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), introduced new verse forms and rhythms; subsequent major poems were The Waste Land (1922), a long symbolic poem of disillusionment, and The Hollow Men (1925). For children he published Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). Eliot's plays include Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1950). His critical works include The Sacred Wood (1920), setting out his views on poetic tradition. He makes considerable demands on his readers, and is regarded as the founder of modernism in poetry. As a critic he profoundly influenced the ways in which literature was appreciated. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, and was educated at Harvard, Massachusetts; the Sorbonne, Paris, France; and Oxford University, UK. He married and settled in London in 1917 and became a UK citizen in 1927, joining the Anglo-Catholic movement within the Church of England the same year. He was for a time a bank clerk, later lecturing and entering publishing at Faber and Faber, where he became a director. As editor of the highly influential literary magazine Criterion from 1922 to 1939, he was responsible for a critical re-evaluation of metaphysical poetry and Jacobean drama, and wrote perceptively about such European poets as Dante Alighieri, Charles Baudelaire, and Jules Laforgue.

Prufrock and Other Observations expressed the disillusionment of the generation affected by World War I. Eliot's reputation was established by the desolate modernity of The Waste Land, and The Hollow Men continued on the same note. Ash Wednesday (1930) revealed a change in religious attitude and the Four Quartets (1944) confirmed his acceptance of the Christian faith. Among his other works are the poetic dramas Murder in the Cathedral (about Thomas à Becket), The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk (1953), and The Elder Statesman (1958). His collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats was used for the popular musical Cats in the 1980s, by English composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Eliot had written poetry for many years, but was encouraged and advised by US poet Ezra Pound (whom he met in 1914) to publish ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ in the magazine Poetry in 1915; it was reissued with several other verses two years later. Pound also helped Eliot revise The Waste Land. This single long poem, in five parts, stands as a key modernist text. Four Quartets is a religious sequence in which the poet seeks eternal reality. Each of the four poems (‘Burnt Norton’, ‘East Coker’, ‘The Dry Salvages’, ‘Little Gidding’) describes a meditation which leads to a reconciliation with the burden of the past.

Beginning with Sweeney Agonistes (1926), Eliot had experimented with verse drama, but Murder in the Cathedral was his first play for stage performance. In this, The Family Reunion (1939), and The Cocktail Party, he tried to reintroduce blank verse into contemporary drama. Eliot's critical works, which include The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), and Notes toward the Definition of Culture (1948), are conservative in tone, emphasizing the traditional values of ritual and community. He coined two important literary critical terms: dissociation of sensibility and objective correlative.