T.S. Eliot: Life and Career

T.S. Eliot: Life and Career

(1888-1965)

The Invisible poet

            Thomas Stearns Eliot enjoyed a long life span of more than seventy-five years, and his period of active literary production extended over a period of forty-five years. He has come to be regarded as one of the greatest of English poets, and he has influenced the course of modern poetry more than any other poet of the twentieth century. “Yet opinion concerning the most influential man of letters of twentieth century has not feed itself from a cloud of unknowing”., says Hugh Kenner, and, therefore, the learned author proceeds to call him the invisible mystifications-he called himself old possum and tried to pretend that he was no poet at all- and partly from the difficult nature of his writings.

Birth and Parentage

            However it may be, the facts of his life are clear and well known. He was born on 26^th September, 1888, at St. Louis, Missouri, an industrial city in the centre of the U.S.A. His ancestors on the father’s side had migrated to America in 1668 from East Coker (the name of one of The Four Quartets) in Somersetshire, England, and had become flourishing merchants at Boston, New England. It was the poet’s grandfather who left New England for St. Louis, and established a Unitarian Church there. He was a man of academic interests and in course of time became the founder of Washington University at St. Louis and also left behind him a number of religious writings. But the poet’s father, Henry Eliot, did not enter the Church. He took the brick-trade at St. Louis in which he was very successful. He married Charlotte Stearns who came directly from Boston when they married. She was an enthusiastic social worker as well as a writer of calibre. In her writing can be seen that keen interest in technical innovations which we find in the poetry of out poet. Thus it is clear that Eliot’s grandfather and his mother contributed a lot to his development as a writer, specially as a religious poet. From his father he inherited his business ability which led him to the bank, and later on made him such a successful head of a publishing firm. Mr. Eliot’s complex, many-sided personality was the outcome of a nunber of inherited factors.

At School

The boy Eliot was first sent to school at St. Louis day school where he studied till 1905, when he went to Harvard University. At school he was considered a brilliant student, and in 1900 won a gold medal for Latin. He began writing at school and showed a marked technical proficiency and sense of humour. In 1897, his father built a holiday resort at Eastern Point, near Cape Ann, in New England, and here the poet passed his school vacations. It was here that the poet became an expert Yachtsman, and consequently, sailing images are frequent in his works. Near Eastern Point there are three rocks known as the Dry Salvages, and a part of the Four Quartets derives title from them.

At Harvard: Literary Interests

The poet was at Harvard from 1906-10 where he pursued a wide-ranging course of studies in language and literature: the Classics, and German, French and English literatures. Particularly keen was his interest in comparative literatures. Particularly keen was his interest in comparative literature. Two of his teachers, Irving Babitt and George Santayana, influenced him profoundly, and he owned his sense of tradition largely to them. Round the year 1908, he read Arthur Symon’s book the The Symbolist Movement in literature, and this stimulated his interest in the poetry of the French symbolists, specially Laforgue.

European Tours

Eliot graduated from Harvard in 1910, and prompted by his interest in the French symbolists, went to France and spent a year at the Sorbonne University at Paris, studying widely in many contemporary writers. In 1911, from Paris, Eliot went to Bavaria, Germany, where he came into contact with important German writers and read their works. He returned to Harvard later in the year and studied Philosophy, specially Indian and Sanskrit literature and philosophy. He was by nature shy, ‘an introvert’ and in order to shake off his shyness he took boxing lessons. In 1913, he was elected the President of Harvard Philosophical Club. However, the very next year he undertook another trip to Germany to continue his philosophical studies there.

Settles in England: Marriage

With the outbreak of the First World War, Eliot had to leave Germany. He came to England and continued his studied at Oxford till 1915. Financial difficulties compelled him to take up the job of a school teacher. From England he submitted his thesis on the philosophy of Bradley for the doctorate degree, but never returned to Harvard to take the degree. The outbreak of the First World War, his meeting with Ezra Pound in London in 1914, and his introduction through him to the lively literary circles of the London of the time, and finally his marriage to an English girl, Vivienne Haigh, in July 1915, led to his settling in London, and making it his home. Thus though born an American, Eliot came to be naturalized citizen to England.