Life and turning point
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888 and studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford. He moved to London in 1914, where Ezra Pound became an important mentor and helped him publish his early work. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and converted to Anglicanism. His writing subsequently gave greater attention to faith and spiritual redemption. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 and died in London in 1965.
Works and changing concerns
Eliot’s early poetry presents alienation, fragmentation, and spiritual emptiness. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917) portrays an indecisive modern anti-hero; The Waste Land (1922) depicts a fragmented, dying civilisation; and The Hollow Men (1925) represents spiritual emptiness. Later works turn toward faith: Ash Wednesday (1930) explores the struggle to believe, while Four Quartets (1943) meditates on time, eternity, and redemption. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) is a verse drama about Thomas Becket’s martyrdom. Fragmentation remains in the later work, but its spiritual focus changes.
Poetic principles
- The objective correlative conveys emotion through objects, situations, or events that evoke it in the reader. Impersonality separates the poet’s personality from the poem. The mythical method uses ancient myths to give shape to modern disorder and contrast the past with the present.