The Works of T.S. Eliot

His Versatility
            T.S. Eliot’s period of active literary production covers over forty-five years. During this long period, he wrote poems, plays, literary and social essays, as well as worked as journalist and editor. He achieved distinction and wielded considerable influence in each of the fields he worked. His writings may, therefore, be studied under three heads, Poetry, Drama and Prose, the later including his Literary and social criticism as well as his journalism.
(A) POETRY
Eliot’s career as poet may conveniently be divided into five phases or periods :
1.      The First Phase : Eliot’s Juvenilia 1905-9. Eliot began writing quite early in life while still a school boy at Smith’s Academy, St. Louis. The poems of this period are immature, juvenile productions, mere school boy exercises, yet showing signs of poetic talent. The poems were published in the various college and school magazines, as the Smith Academy Record and the Harvard Advocate.
2.      The Second Phase : Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917. The collection includes poems written during the second phase of Eliot’s poetic activity, from 1909 to 1917. The Poems were written in Boston, in Europe, and during his first year in England, and show considerable influence of Eliot’s reading of French writers, particularly Laforgue. “They are sophisticated observations of people, of social behavior, and of urban landscapes.” The poetry is of urban streets, and houses and people, not of woods and fields and flowers. Eliot is frankly satirical of Boston society, and the love-theme, when it appears, receives an ironic treatment. The rottenness, the corruption and decadence of contemporary society is exposed with a rare poignancy. The most important poems of this collection are
1.      The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
2.      Portrait of a Lady
3.      The Preludes
4.      Rhapsody on a Windy Night
5.      The “Boston Evening Transcript”
6.      Mr. Apollinax.
The poet had found himself.
3.      The Third Phase (1918-25). The most significant poems of this phase are :
1.      Gerontion
2.      Burbank with a Baedekar
3.      Sweener Erect
4.      A Cooking Egg
5.      Sweenery among the Nightingales
6.      The Waste land, 1922
7.      The Hollow Men, 1925
            The poems are strictly urban in character. They reveal a deepening of the poet’s distress at the corruption and decay of contemporary European civilization. The range and scope of his poetry is now much enlarged. Uptil now he had dealt with particular people and places, but now he, “writes a poetry which belongs to what is called major or great poetry. It may be called epic poetry – and The Waste Land is a kind of compressed epic-for it portrays the state of the civilization out of which it grows.” This is done in a limited way, but still The Waste Land stands in the epic tradition. The poems reveal a considerable maturity of the poet’s powers. The characteristic style and technique of Eliot are now effectively used. The Waste land, specially is fragmented in effect, lacking in cohesion, thus symbolizing the breakdown of beliefs and values in the cultural life of the West.
            The poems are bleak in tone, and have often been regarded as entirely pessimistic. Their gloom is the resultant of the poet’s inner gloom consequent upon over-work, ill-health, the continued mental-illness of his wife, and the harrowing, nerve-shattering impact of the world war on a sensitive temperament.
            We are also introduced to such generic characters in Eliot’s poetry as Sweeney, Burbank, etc., who are not individuals but symbolic figures typifying the grossness and decay of contemporary society. Thus Sweeney is animal and unfeeling, who in his younger days might have been a professional pugilist but in his old age keeps a pub.
4.      The Fourth Phase (1925-35). This is the period of Eliot’s Christian Poetry. Eliot joined the Anglican Church of England in 1927, and this change in his faith in reflected in the poems of this phase. The poet searches for a right way, a right solution to the human dilemma, and he does so through the traditional material and imagery of Christianity. The tone is rather optimistic, and there are indications of the solution which the poet is likely to reach. The more characteristic poems of this Christian period are :
1.      Ash Wednesday, 1930
2.      Journey of the Magi
3.      Animila
4.      Marina
5.      Choruses from “The Rock”
6.      Coriolanous
7.      A number of minor and unfinished poems.
5.      The Fifth Phase (1935-43). This is the period of the Four Quarters, which were published as follows :
1.      Burnt Norton, 1936
2.      East Coker, 1940
3.      The Dry Salvages, 1941
4.      Little Gidding, 1942
This is the phase of Eliot’s religious poetry as contrasted with the previous Christian poetry. In both the phases Eliot is a religious poet-as he ever was-but in the previous period he used Christian imagery and tradition, while now he examines the eternal problems of men without reference to the Christian tradition. “The poems combine the drab and grim picture of modern society which had been prominent before with an intricate contemplation of the problems of space and time, life and death, past and future” (T.S. Pearce). The poet has cast his looks at the worst and yet looks at life with faith and hope.