Better known as
T.S. Eliot, was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and
editor. Thomas was born on 26 September 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri into a
distinguished family, having their roots both in Old and New England. Named
after his maternal grandfather, Thomas Sterns, he was mostly called Tom by his
family and friends. He was a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry,
his works influenced many established British poets of that day.
Major Works
· Among all his works, Eliot considered his 1943 book, ‘Four Quarters’,
his best. Although it consists of four old poems, ‘Burnt Norton’ (1936), ‘East
Coker’ (1940), ‘The Dry Salvages’ (1941)and ‘Little Gidding’ (1942), most
scholars refer to it as his great last work. Although written individually, all
of them have common theme, which is man’s relationship with time, universe and
God. To make his point, he had imported philosophical works and cultural
traditions from various eastern as well as western religions and blended them
with Anglo-Catholicism.
Curious fact
·
In
his childhood, Thomas suffered from congenital double inguinal hernia, which
prevented him from participating in many childhood activities. Consequently, he
had few friends and spent most of his time, reading stories about Wild West and
savages. He was especially fond of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’.
· In 1898, Thomas Elliot entered Smith Academy, founded by his grandfather
William Greenleaf Eliot. Here, among other subjects, he studied Latin, Ancient
Greek, French and German.
· His first poems, written at the age of fourteen, were inspired by Edward
Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. However, they turned out to be rather
gloomy and so he destroyed them.
Play
Four
Quartets is a set
of four poems written by T. S. Eliot that were published individually over a
six-year period. The first poem, Burnt Norton, was written and published with a collection
of his early works following the production of Eliot's play Murder in the
Cathedral.
After a few years, Eliot composed the other three poems, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little
Gidding, which
were written during World War II and the air-raids on Great Britain. The poems were not collected until
Eliot's New York publisher printed them together in 1943. They were first
published as a series in Great Britain in 1941 to 1942 towards the end of
Eliot's poetic career.
Four Quartets are four interlinked meditations with the common theme being man's
relationship with time, the universe, and the divine. In describing his
understanding of the divine within the poems, Eliot blends his
Anglo-Catholicism with mystical, philosophical and poetic works from both
Eastern and Western religious and cultural traditions, with references to the Bhagavad-Gita and the Pre-Socratics as well as St. John of
the Cross and Julian of Norwich.
Although many critics find the Four Quartets
to be Eliot's great last work, some of Eliot's contemporary critics, including George Orwell, were dissatisfied with Eliot's overt religiosity.
Later critics disagreed with Orwell's claims about the poems and argued instead
that the religious themes made the poem stronger. Overall, reviews of the poem within Great
Britain were favourable while reviews in the United States were split between
those who liked Eliot's later style and others who felt he had abandoned
positive aspects of his earlier poetry.
Each poem has five sections. The later poems connect to the earlier
sections, with Little Gidding synthesising the themes of the earlier
poems within its sections.Within Eliot's own poetry, the five sections connect
to The Waste Land. This allowed Eliot to structure his larger poems,
which he had difficulty with.
1. The movement of time, in which brief moments of eternity are caught.
3. Purgation in the world, divesting the soul of the love of created
things.
5. The problem of attaining artistic wholeness, which becomes an analogue
for and merges into the problem of achieving spiritual health.
These points can be applied to the structure of The Waste Land,
though there is not necessarily a fulfilment of these but merely a longing or
discussion of them.
Burnt
Norton
τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί
ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
I. p. 77. Fr. 2.
ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή
The first may be
translated, "Though wisdom is common, the many live as if they have wisdom
of their own"; the second, "the way upward and the way downward is
one and the same"
The concept and origin of Burnt Norton is connected to Eliot's
play Murder in the
Cathedral.The poem discusses the
idea of time and the concept that only the present moment really matters
because the past cannot be changed and the future is unknown.]
In Part I, this meditative
poem begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present moment while
walking through a garden, focusing on images and sounds like the bird, the
roses, clouds, and an empty pool. In Part II, the narrator's meditation leads
him/her to reach "the still point" in which he doesn't try to get
anywhere or to experience place and/or time, instead experiencing "a grace
of sense." In Part III, the meditation experience becomes darker as night
comes on, and by Part IV, it is night and "Time and the bell have buried
the day." In Part V, the narrator reaches a contemplative end to his/her
meditation, initially contemplating the arts ("Words" and
"music") as they relate to time. The narrator focuses particularly on
the poet's art of manipulating "Words [which] strain,/Crack and sometimes
break, under the burden [of time], under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
decay with imprecision, [and] will not stay in place, /Will not stay
still." By comparison, the narrator concludes that "Love is itself
unmoving,/Only the cause and end of movement,/Timeless, and undesiring."
For this reason, this spiritual experience of "Love" is the form of
consciousness that most interests the narrator (presumably more than the
creative act of writing poetry).
East
Coker
Eliot started writing East Coker in 1939, and modelled the poem
after Burnt Norton as a way to focus his thoughts. The poem served as a
sort of opposite to the popular idea that The Waste Land served as an
expression of disillusionment after World War I, though Eliot never accepted this interpretation. The poem focuses on
life, death, and continuity between the two. Humans are seen as disorderly and
science is viewed as unable to save mankind from its flaws. Instead, science
and reason lead mankind to warfare, and humanity needs to become humble in order
to escape the cycle of destruction. To be saved, people must recognize Christ
as their savior as well as their need for redemption.
The
Dry Salvages
Eliot began writing The Dry Salvages at the end of 1940 during
air-raids on London, and managed to finish the poem quickly. The poem included
many personal images connecting to Eliot's childhood, and emphasised the image
of water and sailing as a metaphor for humanity. According to the poem, there
is a connection to all of mankind within each man. If we just accept drifting
upon the sea, then we will end up broken upon rocks. We are restrained by time,
but the Annunciation gave
mankind hope that it will be able to escape. This hope is not part of the
present. What we must do is understand the patterns found within the past in
order to see that there is meaning to be found. This meaning allows one to
experience eternity through
moments of revelation
Little
Gidding
Little Gidding was started after The
Dry Salvages but was delayed because of Eliot's declining health and his
dissatisfaction with early drafts of the poem. Eliot was unable to finish the
poem until September 1942.Like the three previous poems of the Four Quartets,
the central theme is time and humanity's place within it. Each generation is
seemingly united and the poem describes a unification within Western
civilisation. When discussing World War
II, the poem states that humanity is given a choice between the bombing of
London or the Holy Spirit. God's love allows mankind to redeem themselves and
escape the living hell through purgation by fire; he drew the affirmative coda
"All shall be well" from medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. The end
of the poem describes how Eliot has attempted to help the world as a poet, and
he parallels his work in language with working on the soul or working on
society
Movement
Modernism
The large cultural wave of
Modernism, which gradually emerged in Europe and the United States in the early
years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a
sharp break from the past, as well as from Western civilization’s classical
traditions. Modern life seemed radically different from traditional life — more
scientific, faster,more technological, and more mechanized. Modernism embraced
these changes.
Conclusion and Recommendation
In conclusion, T.S.
Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He published his first poetic
masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in 1915. In 1921,
he wrote the poem "The Waste Land" while recovering from exhaustion.
The dense, allusion-heavy poem went on to redefine the genre and become one of
the most talked about poems in literary history. For his lifetime of poetic
innovation, Eliot won the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1948. Part of the ex-pat community of the 1920s, he spent most of his life in
Europe, dying in London, England, in 1965.
I recommend that you read more about him, I think
he was a good author and all of us have to learn more about his life and Works.
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