THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

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THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT
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LIFE

• He was born in 1888 in Missouri from a family of
  English descent
• He graduated in philosophy at Harvard University
• His background was English but also European, he
  extensively read Donne and the Metaphysical
  poets, and he learned Italian by studying Dante
  and expressed his appreciation for his images,
  lucidity and ability to express universal
  situations. In Paris he attended Bergsons
  lectures and read the French Symbolists.

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• At the outbreak of the first World War he settled
  in London where he did several jobs he was a
  bank clerk, a teacher, he wrote essays and poems
  (Prufrock and Other Observations), he edited a
  magazine of European literature,The Criterion,
  finally became the director of Faber and Faber
• He married a ballet dancer and writer with bad
  health and nerves, like himself, they had to
  spend some time in a sanatorium in Switzerland
  where he completed The Waste Land . Poetry was
  a refugee from his unhappy life

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• My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with
  me.
• Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
• What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
• I never know what you are thinking. Think.
• (from The Waste Land)
• Ezra Pound helped him with the final form of The
  Waste land and Eliot dedicated it to him
• Il miglior fabbro (Dantes Purgatory)
• In 1927 he became British citizen and joined the
  Church of England. His views were quite
  conservative but innovative at the same time. He
  defined himself classicist in literature,
  monarchist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in
  religion.
• But he also wrote

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such problems as the distinction between the
use of natural resources and their exploitation,
the use of labour and its exploitationWe are
being made aware that the organization of society
on the principle of private profit, as well as
public destruction, is leading both to the
deformation of humanity by unregulated
industrialism, and to the exhaustion of natural
resources, and that a good deal of our material
progress is a progress for which succeeding
generations may have to pay dearly.(The Idea of
a Christian Society. 1939)

• His wifes death created a terrible sense of
  guilt I have always known hell it is in my
  bones.
• His conversion divided his production into 2
  periods
• Before the conversion it was characterized by a
  pessimistic, nightmarish vision of the world (The
  Waste Land)

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• Then the key words became purification, hope and
  joy (The Journey of the Magi)
• During the 30s he became concerned with theatre
  as a means of denouncing ethical and
  philosophical problems (Murder in the Cathedral
  written in verse with choruses like in the Greek
  tragedy)
• He also wrote childrens poems which were later
  adapted into the musical Cats
• In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for
  Literature
• He died in London in 1965

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WORKS

• As a critic he wrote several influential essays
  on philosophy, religion and literature which
  stated the necessity, for the artist, of being
  impersonal separating the man who suffers from
  the mind which creates.
• He was a modernist poet because, to convey our
  complex and varied society
• the poet must become more and more allusive,
  more indirect, in order to forcelanguage into
  his meaning. The result is a kind of poetry
  sometimes obscure and suitable for an academic
  élite.

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THE WASTE LAND

• It is a long poem made up of 5 sections with no
  unity, presenting an anthology of allucinations.
  The unifying charachter is Tyresias whose
  experience allows him to include all the
  characters.
• - The Burial of the Dead opposition between
  life and death.
• - A Game of Chess contrast between the present
  squalor and the past splendour
• - The Fire Sermon about present alienation
• - Death by Water idea of spiritual shipwrek.
• - What the Thunder Said evokes religion from
  the East and West

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• The poem can be read on different levels
• Narrative 12 hours in a single day with frequent
  shifts from the present to the past linked by
  free associations of ideas as in the developement
  of thought in human minds
• Dramatic the poem is a monologue containing
  parts of remembered dialogues where the central
  figure is Tyresias.
• Its a set of quotations borrowed from different
  cultures and myths to achieve compression of
  meaning and style, to convey universal ideas and
  give a sense of the past as an active part of the
  present as he clarifies in Tradition and the
  Individual talent (p.80)

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THE MYTHICAL METHOD

• Eliot went back to the origins of western
  cultures when legends and myths were symptoms of
  spiritual attitudes which have been lost today.
• He contrasted the present meaninglessness of life
  with allusions to Arthurian legends and the Quest
  for the Holy Grail as a metaphor for mans search
  for spirituality.
• The myth also provided a framework for his work
  giving it a shared sense of narrative and
  allowing him to concentrate on the characters
  emotions

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STYLE AND TECHNIQUES

• He employed a variety of styles to reproduce the
  chaos of present civilization.
• The Waste Land may be compared to Cubist images
  (Les Demoiselles DAvignon) therefore the meaning
  has to be found in the whole work.
• He involved the reader with direct questions also
  expressed in different languages.
• He learned juxtaposition from the French
  Symbolists (Laforgue) associating squalid
  elements with poetic ones
• Repetition of words and images give the
  impression of completion and increase musicality

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OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE

• He used extended metaphors and symbols to
  replace direct statements managing to communicate
  his philosophical reflections. He explained
• The only way of expressing emotion in the form
  of art is by finding an objective correlative
  in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a
  chain of events which shall be the formula of
  that particular emotion (essay on Hamlet)