Tradition and the Individual Talent - T. S. Eliot

[esse]

Tradition and the Individual Talent - T. S. Eliot

from The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism

2015 Reprint of Original 1920 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Published in 1920, "The Sacred Wood" solidified T.S. Eliot's status as one of the preeminent critical voices of his generation. Containing the canonical "Tradition and the Individual Talent" as well as essays on Ben Johnson, Swinburne, and others, the collection shows Eliot working through a number of his most pressing critical interests: the necessary and inviolable bond between past and present literary achievement; the need for criticism that carefully attends to the integrity of a work of art, its essential relation of part to whole; and the concepts of poetic impersonality and the objective correlative. The central essay in "The Sacred Wood" is "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Most fascinating in an initial reading of this essay is Eliot's circling, complex definition of literary tradition. It is not, he claims, a dead collection of writings by dead poets, "a lump, an indiscriminate bolus"; neither is it a body of work from which a few personal favorites can be chosen as exemplars of excellence. Instead, it is a complete order, an organic body in which each part (individual poem) relates to and derives its significance from its place in the whole (tradition). Contents: Introduction -- The perfect critic -- Imperfect critics: Swinburne as critic, A romantic aristocrat, The local flavour, A note on the American critic, The French intelligence -- Tradition and the individual talent -- The possibility of a poetic drama -- Euripides and Professor Murray -- "Rhetoric" and poetic drama -- Notes on the blank verse of Christopher Marlowe -- Hamlet and his problems -- Ben Jonson -- Philip Massinger -- Swinburne as poet -- Blake -- Dante.

--------------------

道德經 王弼本 14. 視之不見(보아도 보이지 않는 것을)

視之不見, 名曰夷, 聽之不聞, 名曰希, 搏之不得, 名曰微,

此三者, 不可致詰,

故混而爲一, 其上不曒, 其下不昧,

繩繩不可名, 復歸於無物, 是謂無狀之狀,

無物之狀, 是謂恍惚,

迎之不見其首, 隨之不見其後,

執古之道, 以御今之有,

能知古始, 是謂道紀.

------------------

T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

from The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920)

 I

IN English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to "the tradition" or to "a tradition"; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is "traditional" or even "too traditional." Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archæological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archæology.

Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French are "more critical" than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historica   sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show.

Some one said: "The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did." Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for the mætier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.

II

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. In the last article I tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of "personality," not being necessarily more interesting, or having "more to say," but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which "came," which did not develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet's mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how completely any semi-ethical criterion of "sublimity" misses the mark. For it is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of transmution of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together.

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.

I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that "emotion recollected in tranquillity" is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not "recollected," and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is "tranquil" only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him "personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression‎‎ of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

III

This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the expression‎‎ of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression‎‎ of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living. 

---------------

Eliot’s Ghosts: Tradition and its Transformations

Sanford Schwartz(from A Companion to T. S. Eliot)

“You told me your thesis was about the influence of Shakespeare on T. S. Eliot,” she said.

“So it is,” he replied. “I turned it round on the spur of the moment, just to take that Dempsey down a peg or two.”

“Well, it’s a more interesting idea, actually.”

– David Lodge, Small World (1984)

The small world of Persse McGarrigle, ingénue hero of David Lodge’s globe-trotting academic satire, has just become substantially larger and immeasurably more complex. In an effort to outshine Robin Dempsey, his apparent rival for the beautiful and brainy Angelica (the “she” of the epigraph above), Persse has tripped upon the reversal of cause and effect that might have turned his humdrum thesis into “the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare,” the paradoxical but more provocative study of a later poet’s influence upon his predecessor. But unlike the antediluvian Dempsey, few of Lodge’s own readers would be startled by Persse’s spur-of-the-moment inspiration: “ ‘Who can hear the speeches of Ferdinand in The Tempest without being reminded of ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land?’ ” (52). After all, the idea that literary tradition is a two-way street had been around for most of the century, and Persse’s rather tame formulation misses its more radical implication – that the present shapes our comprehension of the past as much as the past influences the present. Ironically, the most influential articulation of this view harks back to Eliot’s own essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), and to the subsequent stream of lectures, articles, and full-length volumes that consolidated the poet’s position as the arbiter of literary taste in the middle third of the century. By the time of Lodge’s novel, Eliot had acquired a posthumous reputation as the epitome of a stifling traditionalism, and in this respect Persse McGarrigle’s actual study of Shakespeare’s influence on Eliot is behind the times not only in its old-fashioned approach to literary tradition but also in its focus on a poet whose once unassailable canonical status had been rapidly disintegrating. The fact that Eliot himself was responsible for the more dynamic concept of tradition to which Persse owes his sudden upsurge of individual talent is the unspoken joke that the writer shares with his reader. But it is uncertain whether Lodge’s more militantly “postmodern” readers, eager to represent “modernism” as a spent cultural force, were prepared to accept the joke. Now that we have come to recognize the “postmodern” dimension of “modernism” itself, we seem better poised to enjoy Lodge’s ironies. More importantly, we may also be in a position to appreciate anew the poet who once astonished the world with the ingenuity of his verse, challenging the authority of his nineteenth-century forebears even more successfully than his late twentieth-century critics contested his own.

“Tradition and the Individual Talent”

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” is the locus classicus of Eliot’s concept of tradition. The essay first appeared in two installments (September and December 1919) in the avant-garde journal the Egoist. It achieved broader circulation in Eliot’s first prose collection, The Sacred Wood (1920), and later served as the lead article of his most influential volume, Selected Essays (1932). Eliot cited the essay repeatedly in subsequent works, such as After Strange Gods (1934), Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), and, as late as 1964, his Preface to a reissue of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). Nearly a century after its initial appearance, scholars continue to debate a multitude of issues raised by this pivotal essay: its sources in Eliot’s literary and philosophical background; its place in the artistic and intellectual ferment of the early modernist movement; its affiliations with contemporaries as different as Ezra Pound and Walter Benjamin; its internal divisions and discrepancies, such as the discontinuity between its two major sections – the first focusing on “tradition,” the second on “the individual talent” – and its fluctuation between descriptive and prescriptive stances; its subsequent development in Eliot’s own critical and cultural writings and its relations to more recent work on tradition and cultural memory; and perhaps above all, its relationship to Eliot’s own poetic output both before and after it appeared. Does the essay serve as a reliable gloss on the use of tradition in Eliot’s verse, as many of his early admirers seemed to assume? Or does the essay provide a justification for a poetic practice that may be more complex than the essay itself indicates, a practice that may in turn expose the rifts and ruses within Eliot’s literary program, as some of his later critics came to believe? Should we approach Eliot’s allusive habits as a nostalgic longing for a lost tradition or as a detached and distinctively modern (if not postmodern) orientation to a heritage that has become an “imaginary museum” (Malraux 13),1 operative only in the ironic mode of “citability” (Benjamin 38), pastiche, and parody? However we address these concerns, Eliot’s seminal essay remains a flash point for modern reflection not only on the problem of literary tradition and its attendant concerns with canonicity, influence, and authority, but also on the increasingly urgent issue of cultural transmission in a world that seems caught between irreversible rupture from the past and uncompromising reversion to it.

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” is often read through the lens of Eliot’s later and more ideologically freighted criticism, particularly the oft-quoted remark that his leanings were “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” (FLA vii). Indeed, there is much in Eliot’s early essay that seems to anticipate this elevation of traditional authority over the individual autonomy implicit in romantic literature, egalitarian politics, and Protestant religion: the paradoxical assertion that the most “individual” aspects of a poet’s work are those in which “the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously” (SE4); the claim that any poet worth his salt must write “with a feeling that the whole of the literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (4); and the focus on the poet’s “continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable,” his “continual extinction of personality” (6–7). Under the weight of the venerable “mind of Europe,” there seems to be limited room for the development of an individual voice or new forms of expression‎‎ that are adequate to the changing conditions of the world we inhabit (6). Seen from this perspective, Eliot retains the acute historical sensibility of nineteenth-century intellectuals, but in the process of rejecting the evolutionary or developmental paradigm that characterized their thought, he transforms “the historical sense” into a seemingly ahistorical awareness of a permanent and authoritative tradition (4). Even as he shifts from “tradition” to the creative “individual talent” in the second half of the essay, Eliot couches the act of poetic invention in a markedly anti-romantic “Impersonal theory of poetry” that transmutes personal emotion into the “significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet” (7, 11). This account of poetic “depersonalization” seems to confirm‎‎ the prevailing image of the reactionary Eliot and offers us little reason to see the young poet-critic as significantly different from the one who became the sitting target of wave after wave of cultural antagonism in the decades after his death.

However satisfying this reading may be to a later generation, it presents only half of Eliot’s equation in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

The necessity that [the artist] shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities. (SE 5)

A critical eye will find it easy to fault this formulation. If nothing else, the focus on “existing monuments” implies an elitist aesthetic, says little about the social framework of artistic production, and begs a variety of questions concerning canon formation and the complex interaction among various literary voices, styles, and forms that coexist and often compete for cultural dominance. Nevertheless, in its own time Eliot’s emphasis upon the “simultaneous” and “ideal” order was a means of extricating voices from the past from an increasingly pedantic historical method that tethered them to their own bygone age. Eliot may well have been echoing his friend and editor Ezra Pound, who expressed the same shift from historical to aesthetic criteria a few years earlier: “All ages are contemporaneous. … What we need is a literary scholarship, which will weigh Theocritus and Yeats with one balance, and which will judge dull dead men as inexorably as dull writers of today, and will, with equity, give praise to beauty before referring to an almanack [sic]” (6). Pound was engaged in raising ghosts from the past to “make it new” in the present, and his hostility to the forms of modern life, like Nietzsche’s, led increasingly to the search for lost traditions – and the values implicit in them – that the modern world had abandoned, suppressed, or distorted beyond recognition. Eliot for his part hews closer to the “main current” of tradition, while reminding us that the vital center “does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations” (SE 5–6).

Also evident in Eliot’s reference to an “ideal order” is the patently modern recognition, articulated with precision in his 1916 doctoral dissertation on the philosopher F. H. Bradley, of “the relativity and the instrumentality of knowledge” (KE 169), including our knowledge of the past. As he states in his thesis, the development of any science is “rather organic than mechanical”; it provides a provisional if efficacious “point of view” that establishes a framework for new inquiry and is in turn modified by its own discoveries “into something new and unforeseen” (61). In a similar way, the elements of tradition constitute an “ideal order” that sets the stage for the “supervention of novelty” that alters “the wholeexisting order.” Of course, the organic notion of tradition as “a living whole” has been a cornerstone of modern conservative thought ever since Edmund Burke issued his famous Reflections on the Revolution in France (SE 7). But in light of his more radical Bradleyan perspective, Eliot comes close to turning the tables on Burke. If as a result of “the really new” work of art, the past is “altered by the present as much as the present is directed by past,” then the tail of innovation begins to wag the dog of tradition. The same is true of the “Impersonal theory of poetry” that dominates the second half of the essay. If the upshot of the poet’s “self-sacrifice” is a “medium … in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways,” Eliot’s dissociation between “the man who suffers and the mind which creates” is far less a program for self-suppression in favor of an authoritative tradition than a call to the “transmutation” of passions and feelings into something “new and unforeseen” (8–9).

The countervailing tendencies in Eliot’s essay allow us to seize it by either end of the stick, or to play one tendency against the other. As the mid-century hegemony of the New Criticism began to decline, critics found it tempting to set the second half of the essay in opposition to the first, teasing out the discrepancies between the self-declared “classicist” and the closet “romantic” whose works attest to the very aesthetic he sought to supersede. In the process of unseating Eliot’s own authority, this revisionist tendency brought to the fore the more personal poetic voice and the more self-divided critical stance that was there all along. At the same time, with the release of Eliot’s doctoral dissertation (first published in 1964), it became increasingly apparent that the mind of the young philosopher was more dialectical than dogmatic, more inclined to Bradley’s emphasis upon the limitations of conceptual knowledge than to his notion of the Absolute. In his early literary essays, which began to appear soon after the completion of the thesis, Eliot employs the same strategy through which he exposes the one-sidedness of “idealism,” which privileges mind over its objects, and “realism,” which starts with objects and then tries to account for their representation in the mind. Most of Eliot’s readers are well acquainted with his attempt to offset an excessive subjectivism in late romantic poetry – the literary equivalent of philosophical idealism – by emphasizing dispassionate receptivity to the objects of experience (which include the poet’s own emotions and feelings). Less well known is his criticism of excess in the opposite direction – the objective extremes of fictional and dramatic realism – by insisting that the artist should not seek to represent the existing world (which is only a product of social convention) but should constitute a new world, or as he puts it in “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), “intensify the world to his emotions” (SE 126). The same double movement may be at work in the conflicting currents of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which appeared at the same time as the essay on Hamlet. In other words, it is unnecessary to set the “classical” Eliot against the crypto-“romantic,” the poet who conforms to “tradition” against the “individual talent” who produces “new and sudden combinations” (185). Admittedly, the rhetorical force of the essay lies more on one side than the other, and it would be a mistake to ignore this telling asymmetry or its effects upon Eliot’s readers, both advocates and adversaries alike. Nevertheless, the concept of tradition developed in the first half of the essay is not only open to innovation but actually depends upon the individual creativity explored in the second half. And as we shall see, the specific type of novelty explored in the latter portion of the essay does not arise ex nihilo from the uncreated depths of individual genius but from the selective retrieval‎‎ and reworking of the tradition itself.

Talent and the Individual Tradition

Taken together, the two halves of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” speak to the pervasive counterpointing of past and present in Eliot’s early verse, which seems to hold out the same set of interpretive options prompted by the opposing tendencies of his essay. If the section on “tradition” directs us to the swarm of allusions that establish parallels and contrasts with the state of modern life, the ensuing section on “individual” creation calls attention to the “new combinations” that these allusions produce. On the one hand, the various modern personae who populate the early poetry, whether or not they are aware of it, are situated in a field of textual references that awaken the sense of something other and elsewhere – a tradition that elicits the remembrance of a spiritual legacy that still reverberates in the “deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate” (UPUC 149). Prufrock, “Apeneck” Sweeney, Gerontion, Madame Sosostris, as well as the anonymous “Hollow Men,” are animated largely by their ruptured relationship to this heritage or to the even more distant primitive and immemorial rites that position us as creatures “[b]etween two worlds” (CPP 141). On the other hand, past and present are fused together “in peculiar and unexpected ways” that compel our attention through the surprising and often complex relations they establish (SE 9). Hence the tradition is at once the site of a lost order as well as the repository of images, voices, and literary techniques that generate new forms of expression‎‎ commensurate with the belated and ironically self-aware situation of the modern artist.

The remarkable staying power of Prufrock’s “Love Song,” Eliot’s first major poem (1910–11), is attributable at least in part to this double-pronged appropriation of the past:

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid. (CPP 6)

Much is made of the obscurity and obliqueness of Eliot’s allusions, but even if the full appreciation of these lines depends upon our biblical literacy (Mark 6.14–29; Matthew 14.1–12), we have little difficulty comprehending the transposition of prophetic lament – “wept and fasted, wept and prayed” (echoes of 2 Samuel 1.12, 12.21) – to the spiritually impoverished but psychologically exacting rituals of exchange in the modern drawing room. Such trademark allusions call up a tradition that hovers between presence and absence, haunting us with the remembrance of that which we can no longer embrace but cannot rid ourselves. At the same time, this union of spiritual anguish and social decorum, the resolutely self-sacrificial and the fastidiously trivial, also exhibits those “new and sudden combinations” that Eliot associates with poetic creativity – the “gift for combining, for fusing into a single phrase, two or more diverse impressions” that he found in Shakespeare, Donne, and their contemporaries, as well as in Laforgue and the French symbolists, and cultivated throughout the first half of his career (SE 185). Of course, not all of Eliot’s poetic allusions display this talent for “amalgamating disparate experience” (247), and many of his “new compound[s]” arise from sources other than the intersection of past and present (8). But in the union of these two processes – recollection of the past and formation of new combinations in the present – we find the voice that is at once steeped in tradition and thoroughly modern; and, in their uncanny blending of pathos and humor, such compounds express both the crisis of modernity and the quickening power of the resources, compensations, and perhaps even recuperative possibilities still available to it.

Many of the allusions in Eliot’s early poetry operate in this double fashion, simultaneously eliciting an estranged tradition and transforming it into a distinctively modern idiom. At the same time, Eliot’s readers continue to struggle with, and often object to, the elusive references, the scraps of verbal citation that require both immense learning and considerable patience to wrest whatever significance they may have. These difficulties may be most evident in the epigraphs that appear in many of the poems prior to The Waste Land, a significant portion of which are unidentified or in a foreign tongue. At the gateway of “Prufrock,” for instance, stands the block of italicized words that some might recognize as Dante’s Italian, but most will stare at bemusedly. The conventions of the epigraph allow us to jump, however hesitantly, from the title to the first line of the poem, but if nothing else, this enigmatic mass seems to indicate that we are entering a dense terrain that may demand as much erudition as the poet himself possesses. Part of the message appears to be, as the poet puts it in his famous essay, that tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor” (SE 4). But for those undaunted readers who are prepared to expend that labor (or take the shortcut of a reader’s guide), the fragment offers a beguiling perspective on the voice of the lines to follow:

If I but thought that my response were made

to one perhaps returning to the world,

this tongue of flame would cease to flicker.

But since, up from these depths, no one has yet

returned alive, if what I hear is true,

I answer without fear of being shamed. (Inf. XXVII, 61–66)

The speaker of these lines, Guido da Montefeltro, has been consigned to the niche reserved for false counselors in the densely populated eighth circle of Hell. In this instance the deceiver becomes the victim of his own self-deception, revealing his identity to Dante in the mistaken belief that his auditor must be a permanent resident of the underworld. What appears to be a private confession to one of the dead turns out to be a public disclosure to the world of the living. In this respect the epigraph not only sets the stage for the subsequent portrait of the modern inferno, dramatizing the all-consuming rift between self and world entailed in the struggle “[t]o prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” (CPP 4). By simultaneously accentuating and blurring the boundary between private and public utterance, the epigraph also points to the peculiar suspension between lyric and dramatic voices, between internal musing and conversational speech, that underscores the central conflict between the effort to sustain an autonomous identity and the disorientation that ensues from immersion in the sea of “human voices” (7). Seen from this perspective, Guido’s speech displays a double movement akin to Eliot’s more transparent allusions. The shades of the dead establish similarities-in-difference to the situation of the present, while the modern journey to the past brings forth a poetic speech that is neither interior monologue nor an address to an auditor (the province of Victorian dramatic monologue), but something “rich and strange” that inhabits the uncertain space between them.2 Already in this early poem (1910–11), the individual talent had constructed “a new compound,” a fusion of poetic forms that cannot be identified with any voice in our actual experience, but that, like the work that combines disparate or contrasting emotions into “a new art emotion,” intrigues and haunts us through the dissonant union of its constituent voices (SE 8, 10).

In The Waste Land, these complex relations between tradition and the individual talent expand into a structural principle, which (according to his appended Notes) Eliot derived from James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough (1890–1915), and Jessie Weston’s related study, From Ritual to Romance (1921), and developed into something akin to the “continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” that Eliot found in the “mythical method” of Joyce’s Ulysses (SP 178). The allusions to a lost cultural tradition continue to operate as they did in “Prufrock,” “Gerontion,” and other early poems, but instead of an individual persona we now have a panorama of different figures, primarily though not exclusively modern, situated within an enduring archetypal framework that highlights the failure and futility of their condition. As in previous poems, the allusions in The Waste Land still provide the compensatory satisfaction of forming new composites: “But at my back from time to time I hear / The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring / Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring” (CPP 43) – where Marvell’s memorable carpe diem, chiming with the more obscure echo of Actaeon and Diana in John Day’s Parliament of Bees (mentioned in Eliot’s Notes [52]), modulates into the frenetic cacophony and routine sexuality of the modern waste land, at once continuous with and cut off from the past. But in addition to these “words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations” (SE 185), The Waste Land is assembled through the juxtaposition of larger blocks of disparate material – vignettes, pastiches, apostrophes, songs, etc. – interspersed with a variety of passing references, brief tags, or mere noise, and woven together through a network of motifs and recurrent symbols. These juxtapositions reflect primarily a change in scale, and therefore Eliot’s attempt at a modern long poem may be regarded as the further development of the principles and practices of his earlier verse. But to the extent that we take our interpretive cues from the references to Frazer and Weston in Eliot’s Notes, there is something unsettling about a framework that grounds the spiritual legacy of Western culture – and more specifically the foundational event of the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God – in a more comprehensive pattern of vegetation ceremonies based on the naturalistic cycle of the seasons. Does our tradition bear within it the voice of transcendent authority and the power of spiritual redemption, or does the anthropological grounding of religious tradition establish a new and seemingly universal vision only at the cost of taking us one step further in the modern “disenchantment of the world”?3

For similar reasons there is also something disturbing in the ostensibly curative sequence formed by Eliot’s ingenious juxtapositions, which seem to move, however tentatively, from death (winter) to renewal (spring) in the last two sections of the poem. Once we have passed through the remedial calm of the moral injunction – Datta (give), Dayadhvam (sympathize), and Damyata (control) – what are we are to make of the final cascade of “fragments” that reprise the discontinuous character of the poem itself (CPP 50)? Does the dazzling collage of disparate voices throughout the poem culminate in a movement toward possible regeneration, or are we left with a “heap of broken images” that signify the terminal state of a tradition in ruins? Most would agree that the pieces coalesce poetically into something “rich and strange,” but in the end the poem seems to hover between unity and fragmentation, the unity at once tentatively affirmative and ironically qualified by the very principle that informs it, the fragmentation perhaps dispiriting but also indicative of the enormous “variety and complexity” that must be assimilated in any adequate reconstruction of our cultural heritage (SE 248). Even for those who dismiss such reconstruction as mere nostalgia for a world well lost, the poem stands as a monument to the drastically altered circumstances in which we live, while its “variety and complexity” bears witness to a future dependent upon acceptance if not joyous celebration of life among the fragments.

Orthodoxy and the Individual Heresy

In the wake of his religious conversion, Eliot modified his concept of tradition as well as his allegiance to the kind of allusions that inspired his early poetic creation. In the infamous and never reprinted After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934), tradition is no longer an organic system composed of individual aesthetic monuments but a more inclusive notion, virtually synonymous with “culture” in the broadest sense of the term, which “involves all those habitual actions, habits and customs, from the most significant religious rite to our conventional way of greeting a stranger, which represent the blood kinship of ‘the same people living in the same place’ ” (18). This reformulation clears the way for the introduction of “orthodoxy,” which is the enduring standard of authority by which we examine, correct, and renew the tradition as it actually exists (22). If tradition is a largely unconscious process embedded in feeling and action, the maintenance of orthodoxy “calls for the exercise of all our conscious intelligence” (31). As a criterion for right living and thinking, orthodoxy can deliver some harsh strictures, and as its self-appointed guardian Eliot is no more tolerant of the “heretical” secular tendencies of major modern poets than he is of the culturally disruptive presence, as he puts it, of “any large number of free-thinking Jews” (20). Eliot would come to regret such scandalous remarks, but before we dismiss his later work on the basis of such missteps (as telling as they may be), we should consider some of the more successful essays of his immediate post-conversion years.

If orthodoxy can trigger inquisition, it can also lead to insight, as it does in Eliot’s little-known 1927 piece on Machiavelli’s The Prince (FLA47–65), which detaches this seemingly “modern” work from the new secular spirit with which it is usually associated and shrewdly resituates it within the tradition of late medieval Christian thought. The same is true of his more familiar 1930 essay on Baudelaire (SE 371–81), which rescues the poet from his association with late nineteenth-century aestheticism and recovers the traditional religious sensibility that informs (and dramatically enriches) his groundbreaking lyrical portraits of the modern city. We should also consider the judicious discussions of tradition in such essays of the 1940s–50s as “Yeats” (OPP 295–308), “What is a Classic?” (53–71), “The Social Function of Poetry” (15–21), and “American Literature and the American Language” (TCTC 43–60), his long deferred acknowledgment of a considerable literary debt (Oser 20–21). These later writings sometimes suffer from excessive qualification and from the conscious effort to achieve the equipoise of the seasoned sage. But they take us well beyond the scope of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in their sensitivity to the varieties of literary expression‎‎; to the various time frames – one’s own generation, the immediate past, the preceding era, the longer arc of the epoch, the enduring tradition – that inform any significant creative achievement in the present; and to the interactions between literary creativity and the evolution of the language, the social fabric, the national character, and the balance between stability and change that no civilization can afford to take for granted.

Significant changes also appear in the lyric poetry composed after the mid-twenties. Gone is the gallery of modern personae who are unaware of or unable to affirm the larger pattern embedded in the poetry itself. Gone as well is the allusive practice that perpetually fuses past and present into “new and sudden combinations.” Donne gives way to Dante, and instead of the succession of metaphysical ironies we have the more measured, often meditative voice of the pilgrim whose journey forward is also an effort to recover what has been lost or forgotten, a return to what we are always in danger of allowing to slip away. The poet still draws his inspiration from the voices of the dead, but they are more companionable shades that bear witness to the same authority, and like the “familiar compound ghost” who appears in his last major poem, “Little Gidding,” they share the recognition that “last year’s words belong to last year’s language,” and answer to the common call, which never changes but is never the same, “[t]o purify the dialect of the tribe” (CPP 140–41). Similarly, as he shifted his creative energies increasingly toward the theater, Eliot continued to employ the scaffolding of ancient myth and ritual that he adopted in The Waste Land, but instead of the juxtaposition of radically disparate materials he comes closer to Joyce’s own “mythical method” by staging a single sustained plot that establishes “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.” We still find characters who are oblivious to the pattern in which they participate, but the center of attention now shifts to figures who traverse the gap between past and present and project the sense “that they are living at once on the plane that we know and on some other plane of reality from which we are shut out” (EED 173).

It is difficult to overestimate the significance of the struggle between tradition and innovation, the heritage of the past and the unique conditions of the present, in the political, social, and artistic debates of the last two centuries. Indeed, the modern concern with tradition is inseparable from the pervasive sense of the increasing distance between past and present that arose in the eighteenth century and accelerated dramatically in the wake of the French Revolution and the massive upheavals of industrial transformation in the nineteenth century. In this respect, Eliot is a relatively late arrival in a longstanding dispute, and he arrived upon the scene at a moment in which the evolutionary model – and its attendant notion of “progress” – through which many nineteenth-century intellectuals negotiated the rival claims of stability and change, was cracking under the ever-intensifying pressure from the very forces that produced it. Whether or not he rebounds from the current slump of his literary fortunes, Eliot remains a compelling if controversial case of early twentieth-century efforts to balance these opposing allegiances. In the years since his death, it has become more and more common to subsume Eliot within his own dogmatic creed – classicist, royalist, Anglo-Catholic – or to divorce his poetry (or at least his early poetry) from his prose and treat him as an exemplary instance of the peculiar association between avant-garde aesthetics and reactionary politics that we find in Pound, Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and other luminaries of the modernist movement. The very persistence of the first view suggests that it is not entirely without foundation, and the second has much to recommend it even as it calls for further explanation. As a literary and cultural critic, Eliot leans decisively in one direction, but as we have seen in his seminal program piece, his concept of tradition contains an irreducibly radical element, and his notion of individual “surrender” and “self-sacrifice” is associated not with the commitment to shopworn literary forms but to the creation of new and surprising “combinations.” We find the same doubleness in the perpetual juxtaposition of past and present in the early poetry, which may be read either as an elegiac lament for a lost tradition or as an ingenious staking of new poetic ground, but ultimately turns on the tension between them. This tension reaches its maximum in the discord between unity and fragmentation in The Waste Land. We may focus, as did Eliot’s New Critical followers, on the vegetation ceremonies, at once sexual, social, and spiritual, that underlie its network of recurrent symbols and weave together its many divergent voices. Or we may direct our attention to the assemblage of stylistic pastiche and to the radical fragmentation that anticipates the irreducible multiplicity of the postmodern condition. The poem lends itself to either view, but the enduring fascination of Eliot’s masterpiece lies in its power to pull us simultaneously in opposite directions, toward a tradition that may or not offer the prospect of redemption, and to a historically unprecedented situation that shuffles between the pride of its coming of age and the uncanny persistence of ghosts that refuse to stay away.

Notes

1 Malraux’s phrase, “le musée imaginaire,” appears as “museum without walls” in the English translation.

2 “[R]ich and strange” comes from Ariel’s song in The Tempest(I.ii.397–403), Eliot’s favorite means of alluding to the process of metamorphosis or magical transformation.

3 “Disenchantment of the world” is Weber’s famous phrase, “Entzauberung der Welt” (221). For more on Eliot’s use of Frazer and Weston, see “FISHING, WITH THE ARID PLAIN BEHIND ME”: DIFFICULTY, DEFERRAL, AND FORM IN THE WASTE LAND.

References and Further Reading

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790. Ed. J. C. D. Clark. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001.

Cianci, Giovanni, and Jason Harding, eds. T. S. Eliot and the Concept of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Dante Alighieri. Inferno. Trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. New York: Random, 2000.

Flinn, Anthony. Approaching Authority: Transpersonal Gestures in the Poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and Williams. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1997.

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. 1960. 2nd ed. New York: Seabury, 1975.

Jay, Gregory S. T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983.

Levenson, Michael H. A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Litz, A. Walton. “The Allusive Poet: Eliot and His Sources.” T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History. Ed. Ronald Bush. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 137–51.

Lodge, David. Small World. London: Secker, 1984.

Longenbach, James. “ ‘Mature poets steal’: Eliot’s Allusive Practice.” The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. A. David Moody. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 176–88.

——. Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.

Lucy, Seán. T. S. Eliot and the Idea of Tradition. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1960.

Malraux, André. The Voices of Silence. 1947–49. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978.

Oser, Lee. T. S. Eliot and American Poetry. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1998.

Pearson, Gabriel. “Eliot: An American Use of Symbolism.” Eliot in Perspective: A Symposium, ed. Graham Martin. New York: Humanities, 1970. 83–101.

Pound, Ezra. The Spirit of Romance. 1910. New York: New Directions, 1968.

Rabaté, Jean-Michel. The Ghosts of Modernity. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1996.

——. “Tradition and T. S. Eliot.” The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Ed. A. David Moody. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 210–22.

Reeves, Gareth. “T. S. Eliot and the Idea of Tradition.” Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide, ed. Patricia A. Waugh. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 107–18.

Riquelme, John Paul. Harmony of Dissonances: T. S. Eliot, Romanticism, and Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.

Sauerberg, Lars Ole. Versions of the Past – Visions of the Future: The Canonical in the Criticism of T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.

Shils, Edward. Tradition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981.

Shusterman, Richard. T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.

Svarny, Erik. “The Men of 1914”: T. S. Eliot and Early Modernism. Philadelphia: Open UP, 1988.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1905. Trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Scribner, 1958.

----------------------------

The Poet and the Pressure Chamber: Eliot’s Life

Anthony Cuda(from A Companion to T. S. Eliot)

Over the course of his long career, T. S. Eliot preferred to think about poetry not as the communication of ideas but as a means of emotional relief for the artist, a momentary release of psychological pressure, a balm for the agitated imagination. In 1919, he called poetic composition an “escape from emotion”; in 1953, a “relief from acute discomfort” (SE10; OPP 98). At first, poetry alleviated for him the mundane pressures of a bank clerk who lived hand-to-mouth, caring for his sick wife during the day and writing for the Times Literary Supplement at night; later, it lightened the spiritual pressures of a holy man in a desert of solitude with the devils conniving at his back. Most frequently, though, it eased the pressure of an artist doubting his talent, an acclaimed poet who wrote more criticism than poetry, ever fearful that the fickle Muse had permanently left him. The most intensely creative stages of Eliot’s life often coincided with the periods in which he faced the most intense personal disturbances and upheavals.

But where do we, as students of Eliot, begin to account for that pressure? “The pressure,” as he himself called it, “under which the fusion takes place” and from which the work of art emerges (SE 8)? We could begin with the bare facts. Eliot was the youngest of seven children, born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. His family traced its roots to the early colonies in New England, and his grandfather, a Unitarian minister, moved the family from Boston to St. Louis in 1834 and founded the Church of the Messiah, the first Unitarian church west of the Mississippi. Eliot’s father, Henry Ware Eliot, chose to diverge from his own father’s footsteps in the ministry and pursued a career as president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, while his mother, Charlotte Champe Eliot (a teacher, social worker, and writer) introduced the children to art and culture. But where among these facts, which are barely even “memories draped by the beneficent spider,” does the author of The Waste Land begin to emerge (CPP 49)?

Maybe it’s better to begin in two places at once. For 14 years while Eliot was young, his family divided its time between St. Louis and coastal New England, spending summers near Gloucester, a deep-sea fishing port in Massachusetts where his father eventually built a summer cottage. The yellow fog that winds through “Prufrock” and the brown river-god of “The Dry Salvages” both reflect the time he spent as a boy in the industrialized city of St. Louis. The urban imagery of his early poems, he admitted much later, “was that of St. Louis, upon which that of Paris and London have been superimposed” (“Influence” 422). The peaceful sailing scenes and serene coastal imagery of poems like “Marina” and Ash-Wednesday, on the other hand, arise from his summers in Gloucester, where he learned to sail with his brother. This is where the pressures of Eliot’s creative life seem to begin: somewhere between the hard, claustrophobic inwardness of the city and the open, romantic expanses of the New England shores.

Boston and the Mind of Europe, 1906–1915

Eliot attended private academies as a young man – Smith Academy in St. Louis and then Milton, just south of Boston – before entering Harvard in 1906. Though a lackluster student at first, he joined the editorial board of the Harvard literary magazine, the Advocate, and became increasingly fascinated with literature and philosophy. After three years he went on to pursue graduate work in philosophy, apprenticing himself to influential American intellectuals at Harvard. Josiah Royce, Irving Babbitt, and George Santayana were all among the renowned professors who offered the young student not only footholds in the Western intellectual tradition but also invaluable models of the kind of public intellectual he would eventually strive to become.

Every writer feels the need to tell a conversion narrative, a story that distinguishes “the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast” (in W. B. Yeats’s words) from the artist he or she has become. Eliot was fortunate enough to have two: one literary, the other, religious. The first revolves around a fortuitous discovery at Harvard in December 1908, when he apparently stumbled upon a copy of Arthur Symons’s slim introduction to the nineteenth-century French literary tradition, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), a book that profoundly changed the direction of Eliot’s creative energies. Before then he had read the odes of Keats and Shelley and the dramatic monologues of Browning and Tennyson, and he had imitated the amalgam of violent spiritual energy and demotic speech that he found in late Victorian English poets like John Davidson and Lionel Johnson. He showed a growing interest in Elizabethan drama and a love for Dante’s Commedia, which he learned to read in the original Italian and which remained an imaginative touchstone throughout his career. Under Symons’s influence, however, Eliot’s attention veered toward more recent French poets like Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire, whose laconic wit, ironic pose, and fascination with urban landscapes helped him develop a wry, detached idiom to match his growing interest in philosophical skepticism.

Second in importance only to Symons’s book in Eliot’s early education were his courses with Irving Babbitt, the Harvard professor with whom he was to share a lifelong intellectual kinship. Babbitt’s mistrust of emotional excess and individualism turned Eliot against the romantic literary tradition and toward classicism, which espoused the need for limitations and discipline to curb the natural human appetites and inclinations. The opposition between romanticism and classicism that Eliot encountered in Babbitt’s class deeply influenced his early criticism, especially once he found support for it a few years later in the forceful and uncompromising rhetoric of modernist poet and essayist T. E. Hulme, whose theories he likely first encountered in 1916. Hulme proposed a classicism based on original sin, the Christian doctrine that proposes human nature to be essentially flawed. This was a radically “new attitude of mind,” Eliot wrote when he reviewed Hulme’s Speculations in 1924, and it “should be the twentieth-century mind, if the twentieth century is to have a mind of its own” (“C [Apr. 1924]” 231).

From 1910 to 1911 Eliot spent a crucial year in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and attending lectures by the well-known, provocative French philosopher Henri Bergson at the Collège de France. In the world of contemporary art and philosophy, he later reflected, “the predominance of Paris was incontestable” (“C [Apr. 1934]” 451). He studied French with novelist Alain-Fournier, plunged into the chilling fiction of Dostoevsky in translation, and wrote poetry that drew from his reading in the social realism of Charles-Louis Philippe (especially Bubu de Montparnasse) and the psychological realism of Henry James (as in Portrait of a Lady). He also met and nurtured a close friendship with a fellow lodger in his Paris pension, Jean Jules Verdenal, whose death in World War I Eliot later memorialized in the dedication to his first book.

Eliot returned to Harvard in 1911 to begin a PhD in philosophy. He undertook an intense study of Eastern literary and philosophical traditions, studied primitive myth and ritual with Josiah Royce, and took a class with Bertrand Russell, a prominent British philosopher visiting at Harvard, whose skepticism and intellectual precision he admired. He began his dissertation and, in the following year, accepted a fellowship to study abroad, first at Marburg University in Germany, then at Merton College, Oxford, where he was to work one-on-one with a prominent expert on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley. Soon after he arrived in Europe, however, Germany declared war, compelling the young American to interrupt his studies and head for England early. The change of plans proved immensely fortunate.

A far more important galvanizing agent than any of the professors he encountered at Oxford was the gregarious American expatriate and avant-garde poet Ezra Pound, whom he met just before classes began in September 1914. Pound had been energetically making his presence known in London’s literary circles for six years by the time the two met, and he immediately brought Eliot under his wing. His judicious eye for the most experimental, provocative literary talent soon fell upon Eliot’s early poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which he promptly sent to the prominent Chicago literary magazine, Poetry. “This is as good as anything I’ve ever seen,” Pound told his new protégé (Hall 263). To Eliot, he offered the guidance and unflagging encouragement that the young poet sorely needed; to others, he sang Eliot’s praises tirelessly.

Friends from this period describe Eliot as grave, bookish, and reticent – one unforgivingly labeled him “the Undertaker” – and this side of his personality does resemble the brooding, cynical personae of his early poems (Gordon 139). But we now know that Eliot was also a great lover of popular culture, and his imagination drew as much from forms of “low” culture like contemporary slang and popular music as from conventionally “high” forms like classical poetry, philosophy, and opera. In London he frequented popular locales like the Old Oxford Music Hall, where he admired the outlandish comedians’ “savage humor” and the self-assured bravado of their performances. In Eliot’s eyes, “lowbrow” entertainment was an art with explosive potential for institutional change.

Eliot’s temporary academic sojourn in Europe soon began to assume the look of permanence. The atmosphere at Oxford was stifling, he told his long-time friend Conrad Aiken, and in the midst of seeking release elsewhere he met Vivien Haigh-Wood, a spirited, adventurous, and artistic young woman six months older than he. They were married in June 1915, only a few months after their first meeting, and within the same few months, his early poems – including “Prufrock,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and “Portrait of a Lady” – began to emerge in print. Eliot returned to America in 1915 to tell his family the unexpected news – not only of his marriage but also of his decision to abandon a promising academic career for the capricious whims of the literary life.

Toward The Waste Land, 1916–1921

Eliot’s return from America marked the beginning of a low, dark period of his life. He soon learned of Vivien’s lifelong battles with chronic physical and mental illness. His new wife could be vibrant and wildly creative, but she was also prey to nervous collapses, bouts of migraine and exhaustion, prescription-drug addictions, even suicide attempts, all of which grew increasingly severe. Exhausted physically and intellectually from caring for her and teaching a number of ill-paid, evening extension classes (for “continuing education” students, as we would call them), Eliot himself began to sink into depression and physical enervation. His mentor Bertrand Russell, the philosopher whom he met at Harvard and caricatured in “Mr. Apollinax,” had returned to Cambridge and befriended the struggling couple soon after their marriage. When he learned of their financial worries, he offered them a room in his London flat, where in the coming months the notorious womanizer began a sexual affair with Vivien that would continue for four years. Eliot’s discovery of it, likely sometime in 1917, was crushing. It was a double betrayal – by his new wife and his trusted teacher, who treated Eliot “as if he were my son” (Bell 313) – and it exacerbated the disgust and revulsion toward sex and the spirit of savage, biting satire that together pervade the poems composed during this period.

Eliot took a position in the Colonial and Foreign Department at Lloyds Bank, then the second largest bank in England, in March 1917 in the hopes of gaining a degree of economic stability. In addition to continuing his evening lectures, he oversaw the publication of his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), and assumed an assistant editorship atThe Egoist, an avant-garde literary magazine. He worked late into the evenings composing dozens of iconoclastic reviews and essays that aimed at revolutionizing the Victorian and Georgian ideals of artistic decorum and propriety that still dominated the literary establishment. The contentious and authoritative tone of these essays reflects the young American’s desire to break into the “safe” (as he put it) of the insular London literary world (Letters 392). Through his connections with Pound and others in London, Eliot met Leonard and Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, and other literary giants of early modernism. In 1920, the appearance of his second volume of poetry (published as Ara Vos Prec in England; as Poems in America) and a collection of critical essays, The Sacred Wood, had firmly secured him a reputation as both a radical innovator in poetry and a voice of piercing critical acumen.

As his creative life was coming together, however, his personal life was rapidly falling apart. With their cycles of debilitating illness, Eliot and his wife struggled as if they were locked in a cage together, each feeding off of the other’s physical and nervous ailments in an alarming downward spiral. The roles were often reversed: Vivien cared for Eliot when he was ill and wrote letters on his behalf. “We feel sometimes,” he wrote to his mother in 1918, “as if we were going to pieces and just being patched up from time to time” (Letters 235). The makeshift patchwork came apart in 1921 after a strenuous visit from his family, when Eliot suffered something like a nervous breakdown and was forced to take three months’ sick leave from the bank for psychiatric treatment. He went first to rest at Margate, a tranquil seaside town in southern England, and then to a clinic in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he sought the help of renowned psychologist Roger Vittoz.

It was during this period of collapse and convalescence that he began to assemble fragments of old poems and to compose new segments that would eventually coalesce to become The Waste Land. Despite its elliptical allusions and apparent detachment, The Waste Land is a profoundly personal poem. One of his close friends who read the manuscript soon after its completion called it “Tom’s autobiography” (Gordon 147). This is surely an overstatement, but the poem’s tapestry of classical allusions does align startlingly well with the intricate, tangled patterns of Eliot’s personal distress. From the lascivious “cauldron of unholy loves” implied in the quotation from St. Augustine (“To Carthage then I came” [CPP 53]), to the wind-tossed lovers Paolo and Francesca trapped in Dante’s inferno for eternity (“What is the wind doing? / Carrying / Away the little light dead people” [WLF 13]), many of the poem’s spiritually vacuous personae are chilling echoes of Eliot’s personal nightmare.

On his way home from Switzerland, Eliot stopped in Paris and met up with Pound, who undertook a massive revision of the unwieldy manuscript. He cut long sections, questioned the unity of others, and (along with Vivien, who also read the drafts) recommended additions and revisions. There followed months of anticipation, during which time publishers offered enormous payments for rights to a manuscript they hadn’t yet seen. When The Waste Land was published in its final form in 1922 (first in the Dial and the newly launched Criterion, then in book form by Boni and Liveright), it was half its original length and twice as fragmented, condensed, and lyrically daring.

After The Waste Land, 1922–1930

In 1922, with the help of a wealthy patron of the arts, Lady Lillian Rothermere, Eliot founded the Criterion, an international periodical of literature, culture, and politics that became the staging ground for modernism’s most heated debates in the coming years. He was already at work on a new creative project in 1923, an experimental verse drama called Sweeney Agonistes, when he sent a personally inscribed copy of his most recent volume of poems to a woman with whom he had not spoken for years. While he was still a graduate student in Boston, Eliot had met and fallen in love with Emily Hale, now a teacher of drama and literature. That she shared his feelings was uncertain to him in 1912, however, and when next he saw her, he was a married man who had settled in England. As the coming years proved, however, his early love for her held an undiminished place in his memory. By the time he reached out to reestablish contact with Hale, he had recognized that the only way out of the “chaos and torment” that he and Vivien inflicted upon one another was separation, though years passed before he acted upon this knowledge (Seymour-Jones 414). The copy of Ara Vos Prec that Eliot sent to Hale bore a telling inscription from Dante’s Inferno: “keep my Treasure,” the quotation reads in Italian, “where I yet live on, and I ask no more” (XV.119–20). It seemed a rich if typically cautious promise that he had not forgotten her.

The newly launched general publishing house of Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber) asked Eliot to join the firm as literary editor in 1925. The position offered him a highly influential position in the London literary community and a ready forum for publishing the authors he most admired, including Joyce, Pound, and Marianne Moore. In testament to his growing prominence in literary and academic circles, Eliot was invited to give the prestigious Clark Lectures at Cambridge during the following year. Published only recently as The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry(1993), the 1926 lectures expand his preoccupations with the seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry of John Donne, George Herbert, and Richard Crashaw, tracing their imaginative lineage back to Dante and the Italian poets of the dolce stil novo. He discusses a “tendency toward dissolution” that first began to divide thought from feeling in the English poetry of the seventeenth century (VMP 76), and he applauds the intellectual and emotional superiority of medieval religious thinkers like Richard of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, and John of the Cross. In the latter half of the decade, Eliot’s imagination gravitated strongly toward the intellectual structure and emotional self-scrutiny of religious thinkers like these. He held fast to the conviction that art could not be a substitute for religion, but he also came to believe that religious sentiment could be a potent catalyst for artistic and emotional forces.

Eliot’s creative energies were moving steadily toward the unity of thought and feeling he found in religious writers, and his personal energies were not far behind. During a visit to Rome later in 1926, he shocked his companions by descending to his knees in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà at St. Peter’s. From a philosophical skeptic and poetic ironist, this seemed an unprecedented gesture of devotion and surrender. Perhaps, however, his companions would have been less surprised had they realized that Eliot had been on this path for some time. How could they have known that during a walking tour almost a decade before, he had startled Pound in the same way by confessing unexpectedly: “I am afraid of the life after death” (Schuchard 119)?

Eliot began to meet regularly with William Force Stead, an American chaplain at Worcester College, Oxford. In May 1927 he confided to Stead the exciting news that he had received an unexpected letter from Emily Hale, and that it had “brought back something” to him, as he put it, that he “had not known for a long time” (Gordon 234). He had also turned to Stead in November 1926, when he decided to be confirmed into the Church of England. The baptism and confirmation were both performed with great secrecy at Eliot’s request. He knew that his conversion would likely be greeted with dismay by the literary public, for whom he was still the seemingly nihilistic, iconoclastic author of “Gerontion,” The Waste Land, and “The Hollow Men.”

When he publicly declared his conversion – writing in the 1928 volume of essays, For Lancelot Andrewes, that he was “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” (vii) – it was as he suspected. To many, it seemed an effortless escape from the spiritual devastation and ruins of modernity that he had once so fiercely recaptured; to him, it was the most demanding path possible, a way to face not only the ruins but the vast abyss that lies beneath them. In effect, Eliot chose to follow his beloved Arnaut Daniel, the soul in Dante’sPurgatorio who voluntarily plunges into “the fire that refines” (XXVI.148). In his eyes, this demanded a life of sacrifice, devotion, and celibacy.

Eliot almost immediately turned his attention back to Dante. The medieval poet who had once provided The Waste Land with models for its haunting scenes of infernal torture now offered him a different set of images, one to which he had been drawn years before but had not yet fully grasped: that of spiritual purgation and self-sacrifice. In the essay “Dante” (1929), his imagination moves from the torments of Inferno to the strivings of Purgatorio, as well as to his master’s earliest visionary work, sensing in the Vita Nuova (“New Life”) the very paradigm of discipline, imaginative sublimation, and renewal that he had long sought in his own life. His immersion in Dante also helped him to map the emotional terrain for his own purgatorial poem, Ash-Wednesday (1930), in which he attempted to reconfigure the Vita Nuova for himself. Written between 1927 and 1930, Ash-Wednesday came together just as The Waste Landhad, in pieces and segments that gesture separately toward the emotional consequences of surrender, sacrifice, and self-denial. If, as Lyndall Gordon suggests, “Eliot’s poems of 1927–1935 move toward a pulsating moment or a vision of radiant light” (241), they do so slowly, arduously, and with the same fear and hesitation that characterized his earliest poems of circuitous disbelief and self-torment in Inventions of the March Hare.

“Into the Rose-Garden,” 1932–1939

Eliot returned to the United States in 1932, for the first time since the fraught visit in 1915 on the heels of his unexpected marriage, to give the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard. He arranged to meet Emily Hale while he was there and found tremendous relief in their long-awaited reunion. In a letter to Pound, he admitted that he now felt torn between his thriving career in England and the peaceful domestic pleasures he had rediscovered across the Atlantic.

Before Eliot came back from America, he sent Vivien a request for a formal separation, which she received with shock, desperation, and outright refusal. Friends said that he looked “10 years younger” (“hard, spry, a glorified boy scout,” Virginia Woolf observed) upon his return to England in June 1933, but in private Eliot was committing himself to an ascetic, prolonged solitude (Woolf: 178). For six months he lived in a cramped cabin outside the ramshackle farmhouse at Pike’s Farm, owned by his friend and colleague at Faber, Frank Morley. His demeanor, Morley recalled, was that of “a man who is climbing his private mountain of Purgatory” (Tate 106). Once back in London he effectively went into hiding from his wife, whose frantic pleas for his return grew steadily more public and intrusive. At St. Stephen’s Church, where he attended daily prayer services, he met and befriended Eric Cheetham, an Anglican priest who offered him a place to stay in his presbytery. The austere living conditions at 9 Grenville Place conformed to Eliot’s increasingly ascetic tastes and his desire for a chastened daily routine of reflection, prayer, and atonement. There were few visitors to entertain, the pipes froze frequently, and the walls shook when the train passed by below. He soon took up the position of Vicar’s Warden at St. Stephen’s, a post which obliged him to look after the business affairs of the parish. Emily Hale’s visit to England around this time and the pair’s walking tour of the magnificent grounds at the English manor house Burnt Norton – during which he apparently experienced a visionary sense of release and rejuvenation – only intensified the conflict and self-division that he suffered. He found himself torn between the simple, shared happiness he desired and the chastened, rarefied ideals he associated with the spiritual life.

Once again, however, Eliot released and transfigured the mounting pressures of this internal conflict by transmuting them into the desperate spiritual struggles that confront his protagonist, the medieval English Archbishop Thomas Becket, in Murder in the Cathedral (1935). Boldly experimental and steeped in the vocabulary of self-doubt and temptation, Eliot’s first complete play opened to unexpected and widespread acclaim. He had long been interested in Greek and Roman tragedy, in the haunting, incisive wit of the Elizabethan dramatists, and in the practical intricacies of poetic drama in general. Verse drama now offered him a new and challenging forum for the dramatic impulse that was so clearly present in such early monologues as “Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady,” and in turn, it cleared a space in his poetry for a new, more meditative and discursive style. The variegated styles of The Waste Land were splitting apart: the tumultuous voices of dramatic personae that echo through the poem now found a more traditional medium in actual stage characters, while the solemn voice of the thunder at its conclusion soon found its own place in the Quartets.

The year 1936 saw the publication of two significant collections of Eliot’s mature work. Essays Ancient and Modern reasserted his position not only as an influential and authoritative literary critic but as a steadfast public intellectual, one whose sweeping range of interests encompassed social policy, political institutions, national education, and the uses of culture. His new collection of verse, Collected Poems 1909–1935, represented the concentrated poetic achievement of almost two decades and concluded with his new long poem, “Burnt Norton,” in which philosophical meditations on temporality and irrevocable loss coalesced with memories of his serene visit to the manor house with Hale several years before. Eliot addresses her implicitly in the poem, questioning himself about “the passage which we did not take” and “the door we never opened,” but in the end, turning away from comfort and nostalgia to plunge toward a “darkness to purify the soul” (CPP 117, 120).

By the summer of 1938, Vivien had grown desperate and inconsolable over Eliot’s abandonment and refusal to return to her. She began to wander the streets nightly in distress, and according to her brother, was picked up by the police and committed to a sanatorium called Northumberland House soon thereafter. It seems likely that Eliot did not have a hand in her committal, but he neither prevented it nor attempted to contact her before she died there in 1947. Again Eliot felt the pressures of his personal life escalating, and again he found a release valve in the composition of his second play, The Family Reunion (1939). There the protagonist, Harry Lord Monchensey, returns to his ancestral home to confront his guilt over the mysterious death of his wife, for which he fears he may have been responsible. In the play’s conclusion, he must decide between the comfort and reassurance offered by his newfound lover and the uncertain, lonely path of solitude and purgation offered by the ghostly Eumenides. Harry chooses the latter, claiming “I would not have chosen this way, had there been any other”: “it is at once the hardest thing and the only thing possible” (CPP 280). Though it was not, in truth, the only one possible, Eliot made this choice as well. Over the coming years Emily Hale realized that he did not intend to marry her, and the two drifted apart.

War and the Quartets, 1939–1947

With his editorial energy flagging, his disappointment over The Family Reunion’s lackluster reception, and his growing despondency over the certainty of a second world war, Eliot brought the 17-year run of theCriterion to an end in 1939. Despite the incipient political chaos, he capitalized on his increasingly broad appeal as public intellectual and offered a timely series of lectures, published as The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), in which he emphasized the crucial need for religion, community, and culture in refashioning a society that might withstand the despotic aggressions of a tyrant like Hitler. It is telling that, although many of the poems in the book had already circulated privately among his friends at Faber, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats also appeared at this time. With their jovial lightness and lilting rhythms, perhaps these delightful poems (which eventually gave rise to the blockbuster musicalCats) were meant to signal his farewell to an era of civilization that he sensed radically threatened by the oncoming war. In Eliot’s eyes, the historical and cultural richness that he had so avidly sought when he left Harvard over twenty years before – what he called then the “mind of Europe” (SE 6) – was coming undone.

He had yet to compose a magnum opus, a long work that would be representative of his mature creative abilities. In the strife-filled years between 1939 and 1942, when many theaters closed and public arts organizations folded, Eliot returned to poetry and to the composition of what he now envisioned would extend and complete the creative project he had undertaken four years before with “Burnt Norton.” As he now foresaw it, each new sequence would follow an identical structure, revolve around a particular, familiar locale, and expand outward from “an acute personal reminiscence” (as he put it) toward more universal meditations on time and redemption (Gardner 67). Eliot was hopeful that the poem would bring him the kind of “reconciliation and relief” that he sensed stirring in Beethoven’s late Quartets: “I should like to get something like that into verse before I die,” he admitted (Spender 132–33). But he often doubted the value of his work amid such violence and chaos. “Morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms,” he wrote searchingly, “often seems so pointless” (Browne 158).

During World War II Eliot enlisted as an air-raid warden in Kensington, where he would spend two sleepless nights each week watching for fires caused by German attacks. As the strain wore on him, he took to living outside of London for part of the week, commuting into the city to attend to his publishing responsibilities and assume his fire-watching duties from the roof of the Faber office building. In the midst of it all, the second volume of his long “war” poem, “East Coker,” appeared in 1940; “The Dry Salvages” in 1941; “Little Gidding” in 1942; and the Four Quartets as a whole, “[t]he complete consort dancing together,” later in the same year (CPP 144).

The Smiling Public Man, 1943–1965

After the war ended Eliot returned to live full-time in London and shared a flat at 19 Carlyle Mansions with John Hayward, an avid bibliophile and exacting literary editor whose opinions he deeply valued. In the eleven years they shared the flat, Eliot appreciated both the solitude and the social life that Hayward’s friendship permitted. Other friends from this period recall him living between the usual extremes. At times, the 55-year-old poet was intensely solitary and reclusive, keeping to his part of the shared flat, a sparse bedroom with a large crucifix and writing desk. At others, he was surprisingly jovial and social, giving private readings of his poetry or reciting from memory long passages from Sherlock Holmes, one of his long-time favorites.

After 1948, Eliot lived the life of a “sixty-year-old smiling public man” (as W. B. Yeats memorably referred to himself) (Yeats 216). He enjoyed a private audience with the Pope during a visit to Rome in 1947, gave national broadcasts for BBC public radio, and spent a year at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. The man who had once taught evening courses for a meager living was now invited around the world to give literary lectures. In 1948 alone he lectured in Brussels, Germany, and South Africa. In the same year he was awarded both the prestigious Order of Merit in England and the Nobel Prize for Literature in recognition of “his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry” (Le Prix 56). When he visited the United States he was welcomed as a celebrity and immediately greeted by the press and groups of fans. One lecture that he gave in Minneapolis, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” famously drew an audience of 14,000 listeners. Despite such impressive accolades, however, he maintained regular hours at the publishing house. An interviewer in 1960 recorded his daily schedule, which seemed the routine of an anonymous office clerk: “He left his flat … wearing an impeccable dark blue suit and carrying a tightly rolled umbrella, walked one block to the No, 49 bus stop. When the bus came, he mounted to the upper deck, unfolded his London Times to the crossword puzzle, and fell to” (“Reflections” 22). From his office at Faber, Eliot the publisher turned his attention to promoting and nurturing the literary talent of young writers like W. H. Auden, Djuna Barnes, and later Ted Hughes.

Though he continued to add to his prolific critical writings, Eliot wrote little poetry after the Quartets. The popular stage now consumed his creative energies, even if he claimed to possess no natural talent for dramatic composition. In his later plays, he worked tirelessly to balance the formal elements of dramaturgy with the release of personal pressures that poetry had once provided. In The Cocktail Party, for instance, a semi-comedy which opened to great acclaim in New York in 1949, Eliot examined the kind of suffering he knew from his years of severe and self-imposed solitude: “What is hell? Hell is oneself, / Hell is alone” (CPP342). The popular success of The Cocktail Party landed him on the cover of Time magazine, but he remained dissatisfied with its imperfections and soon set about trying to remedy them in The Confidential Clerk. In his fourth major play, he strove to achieve an even more colloquial, less “poetic” style. “Cut out the poetry,” Eliot once surprisingly remarked, “That’s what I’ve been trying to do all my life” (Matthews 159).

When his sister Margaret died suddenly in 1956, the 68-year-old poet somberly asked his friend E. F. Tomlin, “How does one set about dying?” (Gordon 500). Yet in the nine years remaining to him, he finally discovered the domestic happiness that had eluded him for so long. A few months later he proposed to Valerie Fletcher, his 30-year-old secretary at Faber, and the two were married early in the morning on January 10, 1957 in a private ceremony at St. Barnabas Church, where (as Eliot learned) Jules Laforgue had been married almost a century before. After a honeymoon in the south of France, Eliot returned to his play-in-progress,The Elder Statesman, now lightening the play’s darker undertones and integrating a kind of tender love poetry unknown in his work until then. He was uncharacteristically affectionate with his new wife in public: the man who had seemed to be preparing for death now told reporters that he was considering taking dancing lessons with her. Despite his continuous and increasingly severe health problems, it was a period of profound and liberating peace for Eliot.

After a series of debilitating illnesses, Eliot died of heart failure at his home in London on January 4, 1965. He entertained some remarkable visitors and correspondents during his final months – renowned composer Igor Stravinsky and nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer among them – but perhaps none so singularly entertaining as the comedian and film star Groucho Marx, with whom he drank whiskey, traded photographs, and smoked cigars. News that the famous comedian was coming to London to visit him, he later told Marx, had inestimably improved the poet’s own reputation around town. “Obviously,” Eliot mischievously wrote, “I am now someone of importance” (Marx 162).

References and Further Reading

Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. New York: Simon, 1984.

Bell, Robert H. “Bertrand Russell and the Eliots.” American Scholar 52 (1983): 309–25.

Browne, Martin E. The Making of T. S. Eliot’s Plays. London: Cambridge UP, 1969.

Dante Alighieri. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. New York: Knopf, 1995.

Gardner, Helen. The Composition of Four Quartets. New York: Oxford UP, 1978.

Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. New York: Norton, 2000.

Hall, Donald. Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets. New York: Ticknor, 1992.

Le Prix Nobel En 1948. Stockholm: Imprimerie Royale, 1949.

Levy, William Turner, and Victor Scherle. Affectionately, T. S. Eliot: The Story of a Friendship, 1947–1965. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968.

March, Richard, and Tambimuttu, eds. T. S. Eliot: A Symposium. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1949.

Marx, Groucho. The Groucho Letters. New York: Simon, 1967.

Matthews, T. S. Great Tom: Notes towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot. New York: Harper, 1973.

“Reflections: Mr. Eliot.” Time 6 Mar. 1950: 22–26.

Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Sencourt, Robert. T. S. Eliot, A Memoir. New York: Dell, 1971.

Seymour-Jones, Carol. Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot. New York: Random, 2001.

Spender, Stephen. T. S. Eliot. New York: Viking, 1998.

Tate, Allen, ed. T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work. New York: Dell, 1966.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4, 1931–1935. New York: Harvest, 1983.

Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. 2nd rev. ed. Ed. Richard Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1996.