1

Murder in the Cathedral The action occurs between December 2 and December 29, 1170, chronicling the days leading up to the martyrdom of Thomas Becket following his absence of seven years in France. Becket's internal struggle is the main focus of the play. The play is divided into two "parts" separated by an "interlude". Part one takes place in the Archbishop's hall on December 2, 1170. The play begins with a Chorus singing, foreshadowing the coming violence. The Chorus is a key part of the drama, with its voice changing and developing during the play, offering comments about the action and providing a link between the audience and the characters and action, as in Greek drama. Three priests are present, and they reflect on the absence of Becket and the rise of temporal power. A herald announces Beckets arrival. Becket is immediately reflective about his coming martyrdom, which he embraces, and which is understood to be a sign of his own selfishnesshis fatal weakness. The tempters arrive, three of whom parallel the Temptations of Christ. The first tempter offers the prospect of physical safety. Take a friend's advice. Leave well alone, Or your goose may be cooked and eaten to the bone. The second offers power, riches and fame in serving the King. To set down the great, protect the poor, Beneath the throne of God can man do more? The third tempter suggests a coalition with the barons and a chance to resist the King. For us, Church favour would be an advantage, Blessing of Pope powerful protection In the fight for liberty. You, my Lord, In being with us, would fight a good stroke Finally, a fourth tempter urges him to seek the glory of martyrdom. You hold the keys of heaven and hell. Power to bind and loose : bind, Thomas, bind, King and bishop under your heel. King, emperor, bishop, baron, king: Becket responds to all of the tempters and specifically addresses the immoral suggestions of the fourth tempter at the end of the first act: Now is my way clear, now is the meaning plain: Temptation shall not come in this kind again. The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason. The Interlude of the play is a sermon given by Becket on Christmas morning 1170. It is about the strange contradiction that Christmas is a day both of mourning and rejoicing, which

Christians also do for martyrs. He announces at the end of his sermon, "it is possible that in a short time you may have yet another martyr". We see in the sermon something of Becket's ultimate peace of mind, as he elects not to seek sainthood, but to accept his death as inevitable and part of a better whole. Part II of the play takes place in the Archbishop's Hall and in the Cathedral, December 29, 1170. Four knights arrive with "Urgent business" from the king. These knights had heard the king speak of his frustration with Becket, and had interpreted this as an order to kill Becket. They accuse him of betrayal, and he claims to be loyal. He tells them to accuse him in public, and they make to attack him, but priests intervene. The priests insist that he leave and protect himself, but he refuses. The knights leave and Becket again says he is ready to die. The chorus sings that they knew this conflict was coming, that it had long been in the fabric of their lives, both temporal and spiritual. The chorus again reflects on the coming devastation. Thomas is taken to the Cathedral, where the knights break in and kill him. The chorus laments: Clean the air! Clean the sky!", and "The land is foul, the water is foul, our beasts and ourselves defiled with blood." At the close of the play, the knights step up, address the audience, and defend their actions. The murder was all right and for the best: it was in the right spirit, sober, and justified so that the church's power would not undermine stability and state power.

The Family Reunion is a play by T. S. Eliot. Written mostly in blank verse (though not iambic pentameter), it incorporates elements from Greek drama and mid-twentieth-century detective plays to portray the hero's journey from guilt to redemption. The play was unsuccessful when first presented in 1939, and was later regarded as unsatisfactory by its author, but has been successfully revived since the 1940s. Some critics have thought aspects of the tormented hero reflect Eliot's own difficulties with his estrangement from his first wife. The play is in two acts, set in Wishwood, a stately home in the north of England. At the beginning, the family of Amy, Dowager Lady Monchensey are assembling for her birthday party. She is, as her doctor later explains, clinging on to life by sheer willpower: ...........I keep Wishwood alive To keep the family alive, to keep them together, To keep me alive, and I keep them. Lady Monchensey's two brothers and three sisters are present, and a younger relation, Mary, but none of Lady Monchensey's three sons. Among other things they discuss the sudden, and not to them wholly unwelcome, death at sea of the wife of the eldest son Harry, the present Lord Monchensey. Neither of the younger sons ever appears, both being slightly injured in motoring accidents, but Harry soon arrives, his first appearance at Wishwood for eight years. He is haunted by the belief that he pushed his wife off the ship. In fact Harry has an alibi for the time, but whether he killed her or not he wished her dead and his feelings of guilt are the driving force in the rest of the play.[10] Lady Monchensey decides that Harry's state warrants the discreet observation of the family doctor, who is invited to join the party, ostensibly as a dinner guest. Mary, who has been earmarked by Amy as a future wife for Harry, wishes to escape from life at Wishwood, but her aunt Agatha tells her that she must wait: ...........You and I, Mary

Are only watchers and waiters, not the easiest role, Agatha reveals to Harry that his father attempted to kill Amy while Harry was in her womb, and that Agatha prevented him. Far from being grateful, Amy resented and still resents Agatha's depriving her of her husband. Harry, with Agatha's encouragement, announces his intention to go away from Wishwood, leaving his steady younger brother John to take over. Amy, despairing at Harry's renunciation of Wishwood, dies (offstage), "An old woman alone in a damned house", and Harry and his faithful servant, Downing, leave.[11]

Structure
The play is partly in blank verse (though Eliot uses a stress-based metre, with usually four or five stresses per line and not the iambic pentameter) and partly in prose. Eliot had already experimented with verse drama in Murder in the Cathedral, and continued to use the form in his post-war stage works.[12] Though the work has superficial resemblances to a conventional 1930s drawing room drama, Eliot uses two devices from ancient Greek drama:

Harry's uncles and aunts occasionally detach themselves from the action and chant a commentary on the plot, in the manner of a Greek chorus Harry is pursued by the Eumenides the avenging Furies who pursue Orestes in the Oresteia; they are seen not only by Harry but by his servant and the most perceptive member of his family, Agatha[13]

Despite these Greek themes, Stephen Spender commented that the whole play was "about the hero's discovery of his religious vocation as a result of his sense of guilt."[14]

[edit] Critical reception

Critical reception after the premire was cautious. The Manchester Guardian opened its review: The heart, even of the formidable swarm of intelligence that gathered tonight at the Westminster to see Mr. T. S. Eliot's "The Family Reunion," went out audibly to the family's stupid Uncle Charles when, near curtain-fall, he had the remark: "It's very odd, but I'm beginning to feel that there is something I could understand if I were told it." The review added that apart from the chorus of baffled uncles and aunts, "one looks elsewhere in vain for any articulate philosophy."[15] The Times commented on the lack of drama in the play, but concluded, "But the play as a whole, though it lacks something of stage force, is still one which Mr Eliot may be proud to have written."[1] The director of the play, E. Martin Browne summed up the critical response: The play was received with incomprehension, exemplified in James Agate's sillyclever review in a parody of its verse. March 1939 was not the best moment for a work which pulls off blinkers: England was still trying too hard to keep them on.[16] In 1951, in the first Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture at Harvard University, Eliot criticised his own plays, specifically Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The

Cocktail Party.[17] Eliot regarded The Family Reunion as seriously flawed for reasons that may be summarised as follows:[8]

The play is badly paced, coming to an excessively abrupt conclusion after "an interminable amount of preparation." The Greek elements are not successfully integrated into the work: o the attempt to portray the House of Monchensey as a British House of Atreus poisoned to its roots by sins both recent and long ago fails either to stick closely to Aeschylus or to venture far enough away from him, and so remains marooned in an artistic no man's land o the attempt to transform the aunts and uncles into a Greek chorus is unsuccessful o the Furies are a failure, as they look like uninvited guests from a fancy dress ball It is hard for an audience to sympathise with a hero who renounces his mother, his house and his heritage for the spiritual life, when he is plainly, in Eliot's words, "an insufferable prig."

By the time of the 1956 revival, Kenneth Tynan was referring to "this has-been, would-be masterpiece": "though Mr Eliot can always lower the dramatic temperature, he can never raise it: and this is why the theatre, an impure assembly that loves strong emotions, must ultimately reject him."[18] Acknowledging the flaws in the work, the Eliot scholar Helen Gardner wrote, "Both plot and persons fail to reveal to us, as drama must, a spectacle for our contemplation. Because there is no real action there are no real persons." However, Gardner added, "The progress from Burnt Norton to Little Gidding would hardly have been possible without The Family Reunion.[19]

[edit] Harry
A contemporary review described Harry as "an unresolved amalgam of Orestes and Hamlet" and Eliot himself had vetoed the casting of John Gielgud because he thought him "not religious enough to understand the character's motivation."[8][15] Some modern critics see in Harry a parallel with Eliot's own emotional difficulties of the time, with his estrangement from his first wife.[8] The director of the first production, and Michael Redgrave who first played Harry, both asked Eliot, "What happens to Harry after he leaves?" Eliot responded with an additional fifty lines to Harry's scene with Amy and Agatha (Part II, scene 2) in which his destination is said to be "somewhere on the other side of despair".[16]

[edit] Chorus
In the 1930s, the verse chorus was enjoying a revival begun by Gilbert Murray's wellreceived translations of Greek drama, presented by Harley Granville Barker.[20] Eliot himself had already employed such a chorus in Murder in the Cathedral but his chorus of uncles and aunts in The Family Reunion differs radically from the Greek model and his own earlier version in that their comments are not for the enlightenment of the audience but are expressions of their own perplexity: There is nothing at all to be done about it;

There is nothing to do about anything. And now it is nearly time for the News; We must listen to the Weather Report And the international catastrophes Their absurdity acts as comic relief.[21] Although Eliot came to think that the chorus was a failure, reviewers in the present century have commented more favourably: "The transformation of Harry's buffoonish aunts and uncles into a Greek chorus is at once absurd and compelling."[22] "The chorus are doubly effective when retreating into the spotlight from their own amusingly stereotyped personalities.".[23]

[edit] Text
Before the 1946 revival, Eliot considered revising the play, but "as soon as I start thinking about the play, I have inklings of altering it still further" and rather than completely rewrite his 1939 text Eliot felt "it would be healthier to leave it alone" and he started work on a new play, "One-Eyed Riley", which became The Cocktail Party.[24] Despite his own criticism of The Family Reunion in his 1951 lecture, Eliot let the original text stand. The Cocktail Party is a play by T. S. Eliot. Elements of the play are based on Alcestis, by the Ancient Greek playwright Euripides. The play was the most popular of Eliot's seven plays in his lifetime, although his 1935 play, Murder in the Cathedral, is better remembered today. The Cocktail Party was first performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949. In 1950 the play had successful runs in London and New York theaters (the Broadway production received the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play.) It focuses on a troubled married couple who, through the intervention of a mysterious stranger, settle their problems and move on with their lives. The play starts out seeming to be a light satire of the traditional British drawing room comedy. As it progresses, however, the work becomes a darker philosophical treatment of human relations. As in many of Eliot's works, the play uses absurdist elements to expose the isolation of the human condition. In another recurring theme of Eliot's plays, the Christian martyrdom of the mistress character is seen as a sacrifice that permits the predominantly secular life of the community to continue. In 1951, in the first Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecture at Harvard University Eliot criticized his own plays in the second half of the lecture, explicitly the plays Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party. The lecture was published as "Poetry and Drama" and later included in Eliot's 1957 collection On Poetry and Poets. Synopsis
Edward and Lavinia Chamberlayne are separated after five years of marriage. She leaves Edward just as they are about to host a cocktail party at their London home, and he has to come up with an explanation for why Lavinia is not present, in order to keep up social appearances. Lavinia is brought back by a mysterious Unidentified Guest at the party, who turns out to be a psychiatrist whom Edward and Lavinia both consult. They each learn that they have been deceiving themselves and must face life's realities. They learn that their life together, though hollow and superficial, is preferable to life apart. This message is difficult for the play's third main character, Edward's mistress, to accept. She, with the psychiatrist's urging, also moves on towards a life of greater

honesty and salvation and becomes a Christian martyr in Africa. Two years later, Edward and Lavinia, now better adjusted, host another cocktail party The Confdential Clerk Synopsis

Sir Claude Mulhammer, a wealthy entrepreneur, decides to smuggle his illegitimate son Colby into the household by employing him as his confidential clerk. He hopes that his eccentric wife, Lady Elizabeth Mulhammer, will take a liking to the boy and allow him to live as her adopted son. She in fact becomes convinced that Colby is actually her own son. Meanwhile Lucasta Angel wants to marry B. Kaghan, but neither seems to have any parents at all. A drama of mistaken identity and confusion ensues. The 'confidential clerk' of the title refers both to Colby, in his new job, and Eggerson, Sir Claude's old clerk who is seen retiring at the start of the play but returns in the final act in order to resolve the situation. As in his other plays, Eliot's interests in classical drama are obvious from the formal structures, the subject-matter, and the judgement-scene ending. On the other hand, the influence of drawing room comedy is also paramount and the play is blessed not only with an entertaining if convoluted plot, but a regular peppering of witty one-liners. T. S. Eliot once quipped: A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can't be much good. It was a self-adopted method for Eliot to start from the known and the familiar and work his way into the unfamiliar and the unknown. Eliot realized that the modern man, in the daily hustle-bustle of his existence, is unknowingly gasping for breath, looking for an escape from the quagmire of daily life, which is devoid of all meaning. Eliots drawing room drama The Elder Statesman, is the last of his drawing room plays in which he attempts to give a final expression to his vision of life. In many ways, therefore, The Elder Statesman marks the culmination of Eliots philosophy of life. Murder in the Cathedral deals with the theme of spirituality. The Cocktail Party deals with the theme of misplaced priorities and skewed spiritual visions. The Family Reunion shows us the process by which a man, pre-disposed to sainthood, is made aware of his destiny. In the last drawing room drama, Eliot shows us how no man is rich enough to buy his past, how no one can escape the memories of things gone by. One cannot flee from a guilt-ridden past and can only gain salvation from the same through admittance, contrition and expiation. The Elder Statesman, as a play, is not particularly poetic or dramatic. But its written in powerful verse, which is apt for Eliots theme and expression. What Eliot wishes to tell us is something profoundly true and important: that we cannot flee the past or retire from responsibility. At best, we can off-load it by contrition. And that to find the truth that shall set you free you must strip yourself of all pretense, all acting and become again, a little child. Eliot also shows us that to enter into reality is only possible through others; so that totally shared love is the supreme road to reality, and that as such, love is capable of being self-sufficient, provided it is love which is founded on true confession, resignation and trust.

[edit] Synopsis
When the play opens, the setting is that of Lord Clavertons drawing room. Lord Claverton is

man of distinction, who is well known and well respected in society, where he exerts considerable influence. As the play opens, we see Clavertons daughter Monica, bantering with her beau, Charles Hemington. From their conversation, it becomes evident that Lord Claverton is fiercely possessive of Monica - a fact that Charles grudges. Through the course of the play, we see that Claverton has been forced to retire for medical reasons. He is hounded by revelations from his past - a man (Gomez), who as a student he led into bad company, a singer (Mrs. Carghill), with whom he had an affair and who was bought off by his father. These people unexpectedly make a comeback in Clavertons life, and bring with them all the memories that Claverton has conveniently chosen to forget or overlook. Claverton and Monicas first impression is that Gomez and Mrs. Carghill have returned to claim money from the wealthy Claverton. But it is made abundantly clear to the reader that Gomez and Mrs. Carghill are well enough off on their own account, and have not come back to blackmail Claverton for his money. They only want to spend their time with Claverton. Eliots underlying message is that these two people are the twin agents of conscience that have come back to constantly remind Claverton of his guilt, of how his public image does not match the real man underneath it. Back in his college days, Claverton had a hit and run incident, a fact which Gomez is privy to. As for Mrs. Carghill, she was the love of Clavertons life but she was bought off by Clavertons disapproving father. As a result, Claverton could not make good his promise of marrying Mrs. Carghill. Gomez, who has made a fortune since then and Mrs. Carghill, who is now a wealthy widow, have both come back to Clavertons life as agents of Eliots message. As the play progresses, we see that Gomez manages to lure away Clavertons son Michael, according to whom his father never understood him. It is only Monica, who stands beside her father, offering all the support he needs. She is indeed the spiritual guide who brings Claverton to the light of self-knowledge. It is only by shamefully confessing to Monica that her father is able to gain salvation. Claverton confesses that he never told her about the past as he always wanted Monica and Michael to admire him. Monica assures him that her admiration for her father is irrespective of his past. As for Michael, he is given a farewell so that he may go with Gomez and chart his own destiny. They are both hopeful that Michael will either be successful in his pursuits, or will return home eventually, like the prodigal son. After his confession to Monica and her re-assurance to her father, Claverton expresses his desire to go for a walk. It doesnt take the reader too long to realize that Claverton dies offstage, leaving Monica to Charles. The couple will together lead and be led towards the goal of spirituality and illumination.

Early life and education

Eliot was born into the Eliot family, a middle class family originally from New England, who had moved to St. Louis, Missouri.[4][6] His father, Henry Ware Eliot (18431919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns (18431929), wrote poetry and was a social worker, a new profession in the early twentieth century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children; his parents were both 44 years old when he was born. His four sisters were between eleven and nineteen years older; his brother was eight years older. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather Thomas Stearns. Several factors are responsible for Eliot's infatuation with literature during his childhood. First, Eliot had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital

double hernia, a condition in which ones intestines jut through the bowel wall and causes an abdominal rupture, Eliot was unable to participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from interacting socially with his peers. As Eliot was often isolated, his love of literature developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy immediately became obsessed with books and was completely absorbed in tales depicting savages, the Wild West, or Mark Twains thrill-seeking Tom Sawyer.[7] In his memoir of T.S. Eliot, Eliots friend Robert Sencourt comments that young Eliot would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living.[8] Secondly, Eliot also credited his hometown with seeding his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."[9] Thus, from the onset, literature was an essential part of Eliot's childhood and both his disability and location influenced him. From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was fourteen under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing, and he destroyed them.[10] His first poem published, "A Fable For Feasters," was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905.[11] Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard University's student magazine.[12] He also published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey," "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King." The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration of Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis.[13][14] Such a link with primitive people importantly antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard.[15] After graduation, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer, who would later publish The Waste Land. He studied philosophy at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning his bachelor's degree after three years, instead of the usual four.[4] Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908, when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbire and his book Les amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot's life.[16] The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems, and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken, the American novelist. After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris, where from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Alain-Fournier.[4][16] From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit.[4][17] Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford in 1914. He first visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer program, but when the First World War broke out, he went to Oxford instead. At the time, so many American students attended Merton that the Junior Common Room proposed a motion "that this society abhors the Americanization of Oxford." It was defeated by two votes, after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture.[18] Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and

university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead."[18] Escaping Oxford, Eliot actually spent much of his time in London. This city had a monumental and life-altering impact on Eliot for multiple reasons, the most significant of which was his introduction to the acclaimed literary figure Ezra Pound. A connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on September 22, 1914, Eliot paid a visit to Pounds flat. Pound instantly deemed Eliot worth watching and was imperative to Eliots beginning career as a poet as he is credited with promoting Eliot through social events and literary gatherings. Thus, according to biographer John Worthen, during his time in England Eliot was seeing as little of Oxford as possible. He was instead spending long periods of time in London, in the company of Ezra Pound and "some of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared . . . . It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere.[19] In the end, Eliot did not settle at Merton, and left after a year. In 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck, University of London. By 1916, he had completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, but he failed to return for the viva voce exam.[4][20]

[edit] Marriage
See also: Tom and Viv

Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot (left), with Peter Stainer and Mildred Woodruff, photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell.

In a letter to Aiken late in December, 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote, "I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society)."[21] Less than four months later, Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess. They were married at Hampstead Register Office on June 26, 1915.[22] After a short visit alone to his family in the United States, Eliot returned to London and took several teaching jobs, such as lecturing at Birkbeck College, University of London. The philosopher Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars have suggested that she and Russell had an affair, but the allegations were never confirmed.[23]

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The marriage was markedly unhappy, in part because of Vivienne's health issues. In a letter addressed to Ezra Pound, she covers an extensive list of her symptoms, which included a habitually high temperature, fatigue, insomnia, migraines, and colitis.[24] This, coupled with apparent mental instability, meant that she was often sent away by Eliot and her doctors for extended periods of time in the hope of improving her health, and as time went on, he became increasingly more detached from her. Their relationship became the subject of a 1984 play Tom and Viv, which in 1994 was adapted as a film. In a private paper written in his sixties, Eliot confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of [Ezra] Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."[25]

[edit] Teaching, Lloyds, Faber and Faber

A plaque at SOAS's Faber Building, 24 Russell Square, London.

After leaving Merton, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably at Highgate School, a private school in London, where he taught French and Latinhis students included the young John Betjeman.[4] Later he taught at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, a state school in Buckinghamshire. To earn extra money, he wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses. In 1917, he took a position at Lloyds Bank in London, working on foreign accounts. On a trip to Paris in August of 1920 with the artist Wyndham Lewis, he met the writer James Joyce. Eliot said he found Joyce arrogantJoyce doubted Eliot's ability as a poet at the timebut the two soon became friends, with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever he was in Paris.[26] Eliot and Wyndham Lewis also maintained a close friendship, leading to Lewis's later making his well-known portrait painting of Eliot in 1938. In 1925, Eliot left Lloyds to join the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber, where he remained for the rest of his career, eventually becoming a director. At Faber and Faber, he was responsible for publishing important English poets like W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Ted Hughes.[27]

[edit] Conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship

On June 29, 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism from Unitarianism, and in November that year he took British citizenship. He became a warden of his parish church, Saint Stephen's, Gloucester Road, London, and a life member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr.[28][29] He specifically identified as Anglo-Catholic, proclaiming himself "classicist in literature,

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royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion."[30][31] About thirty years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament."[32] One of Eliot's biographers, Peter Ackroyd, commented that "the purposes of [Eliot's conversion] were two-fold. One: the Church of England offered Eliot some hope for himself, and I think Eliot needed some resting place. But secondly, it attached Eliot to the English community and English culture."[33]

[edit] Separation and remarriage

By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. When Harvard offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932-1933 academic year, he accepted and left Vivienne in England. Upon his return, he arranged for a formal separation from her, avoiding all but one meeting with her between his leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947. Vivienne was committed to the Northumberland House mental hospital, Stoke Newington, in 1938, and remained there until she died. Although Eliot was still legally her husband, he never visited her.[34] From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat with his friend John Davy Hayward, who gathered and archived Eliot's papers, styling himself "Keeper of the Eliot Archive."[35] Hayward also collected Eliot's pre-Prufrock verse, commercially published after Eliot's death as Poems Written in Early Youth. When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge, in 1965. On January 10, 1957, Eliot at the age of 68, married Esm Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August, 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ceremony was held in a church at 6:15 A.M., with virtually no one in attendance other than his wife's parents. Since Eliot's death, Valerie has dedicated her time to preserving his legacy; she has edited and annotated The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land. Eliot never had children with either of his wives. In the early 1960s, by then in failing health, Eliot worked as an editor for the Wesleyan University Press, seeking new poets in Europe for publication.[36]

[edit] Death and honours

Eliot died of emphysema in London on January 4, 1965. For many years he had had health problems caused by his heavy smoking, and had often been laid low with bronchitis or tachycardia. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. In accordance with Eliot's wishes, his ashes were taken to St. Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from which his ancestors had emigrated to America.

A wall plaque commemorates him with a quotation from his poem "East Coker," "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning." In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, Eliot was commemorated by the installation of a large stone in the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey. The stone, cut by designer Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates, his Order of Merit, and a

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quotation from his poem "Little Gidding", "the communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living."[37]

[edit] Poetry
For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small amount of poetry and he was aware of this early in his career. He wrote to J.H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."[38] Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small books or pamphlets, and then collected them in books. His first collection was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). In 1920, he published more poems in Ara Vos Prec (London) and Poems: 1920 (New York). These had the same poems (in a different order) except that "Ode" in the British edition was replaced with "Hysteria" in the American edition. In 1925, he collected The Waste Land and the poems in Prufrock and Poems into one volume and added The Hollow Men to form Poems: 19091925. From then on, he updated this work as Collected Poems. Exceptions are Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection of light verse; Poems Written in Early Youth, posthumously published in 1967 and consisting mainly of poems published between 1907 and 1910 in The Harvard Advocate, and Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 19091917, material Eliot never intended to have published, which appeared posthumously in 1997.[39] During an interview in 1959, Eliot said of his nationality and its role in his work: "I'd say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I'm sure of. ... It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good; putting it as modestly as I can, it wouldn't be what it is if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America."[40]

[edit] The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Main article: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended to Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Although the character Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only twenty-two. Its now-famous opening lines, comparing the evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table," were considered shocking and offensive, especially at a time when Georgian Poetry was hailed for its derivations of the nineteenth century Romantic Poets. The poem follows the conscious experience of a man, Prufrock (relayed in the "stream of consciousness" form characteristic of the Modernists), lamenting his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, with the recurrent theme of carnal love unattained. Critical opinion is divided as to whether the narrator leaves his residence during the course of the narration. The locations described can be interpreted either as actual physical experiences, mental recollections, or as symbolic images from the

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unconscious mind, as, for example, in the refrain "In the room the women come and go." The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri and refers to a number of literary works, including Hamlet and those of the French Symbolists. Its reception in London can be gauged from an unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement on June 21, 1917. "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry."[41]

[edit] The Waste Land

T. S. Eliot in 1923 by Lady Ottoline Morrell. Main article: The Waste Land

In October, 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion. Eliot's dedication to il miglior fabbro ("the better craftsman") refers to Ezra Pound's significant hand in editing and reshaping the poem from a longer Eliot manuscript to the shortened version that appears in publication.[42] It was composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliothis marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders. The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. Before the poem's publication as a book in December, 1922, Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair. On November 15, 1922, he wrote to Richard Aldington, saying, "As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style."[43] The poem is known for its obscure natureits slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. Despite this, it has become a touchstone of modern literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses.[44]

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Among its best-known phrases are "April is the cruellest month," "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" and "Shantih shantih shantih." The Sanskrit mantra ends the poem.

[edit] The Hollow Men

Main articles: The Hollow Men and The Hollow Men in popular culture

The Hollow Men appeared in 1925. For the critic Edmund Wilson, it marked "The nadir of the phase of despair and desolation given such effective expression in The Waste Land."[45] It is Eliot's major poem of the late 1920s. Similar to other work, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary. Post-war Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, Eliot's failed marriage.[46] Allen Tate perceived a shift in Eliot's method, writing that, "The mythologies disappear altogether in The Hollow Men." This is a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante as anything else in Eliots early work, to say little of the modern English mythologythe "Old Guy Fawkes" of the Gunpowder Plotor the colonial and agrarian mythos of Joseph Conrad and James George Frazer, which, at least for reasons of textual history, echo in The Waste Land.[47] The "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" that is so characteristic of his mythical method remained in fine form.[48] The Hollow Men contains some of Eliot's most famous lines, notably its conclusion: This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.

[edit] Ash Wednesday

Main article: Ash Wednesday (poem)

Ash Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem," it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. Eliot's style of writing in Ash Wednesday showed a marked shift from the poetry he'd written prior to his 1927 conversion, and his post-conversion style would continue in a similar vein. His style was to become less ironic, and the poems would no longer be populated by multiple characters in dialogue. His subject matter would also become more focused on Eliot's spiritual concerns and his Christian faith. Many critics were particularly enthusiastic about "Ash Wednesday." Edwin Muir maintained that it is one of the most moving poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect," though it was not well received by everyone. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of the more secular literati.[4][49]

[edit] Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

Main article: Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

In 1939, Eliot published a book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats ("Old

15

Possum" was Ezra Pound's nickname for him). This first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover. In 1954, the composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems for speaker and orchestra, in a work entitled Practical Cats. After Eliot's death, the book was adapted as the basis of the musical, Cats, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, first produced in London's West End in 1981 and opening on Broadway the following year.

[edit] Four Quartets

Main article: Four Quartets

Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.[4] It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942). Each has five sections. Although they resist easy characterization, each poem includes meditations on the nature of time in some important respecttheological, historical, physicaland its relation to the human condition. Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements: air, earth, water, and fire. Burnt Norton is a meditative poem that begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present moment while walking through a garden, focusing on images and sounds like the bird, the roses, clouds, and an empty pool. The narrator's meditation leads him/her to reach "the still point" in which he doesn't try to get anywhere or to experience place and/or time, instead experiencing "a grace of sense." In the final section, the narrator contemplates the arts ("Words" and "music") as they relate to time. The narrator focuses particularly on the poet's art of manipulating "Words [which] strain,/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden [of time], under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, [and] will not stay in place, /Will not stay still." By comparison, the narrator concludes that "Love is itself unmoving,/Only the cause and end of movement,/Timeless, and undesiring." East Coker continues the examination of time and meaning, focusing in a famous passage on the nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope." The Dry Salvages treats the element of water, via images of river and sea. It strives to contain opposites: "The past and future/Are conquered, and reconciled." Little Gidding (the element of fire) is the most anthologized of the Quartets. Eliot's experiences as an air raid warden in The Blitz power the poem, and he imagines meeting Dante during the German bombing. The beginning of the Quartets ("Houses / Are removed, destroyed") had become a violent everyday experience; this creates an animation, where for the first time he talks of Love as the driving force behind all experience. From this background, the Quartets end with an affirmation of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well and/All manner of thing shall be well." The Four Quartets cannot be understood without reference to Christian thought, traditions, and history. Eliot draws upon the theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, and mystics St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich. The "deeper communion" sought in East Coker, the "hints and whispers of children, the sickness that must grow worse in order to find healing," and the exploration which inevitably leads us home all point to the

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pilgrim's path along the road of sanctification.

[edit] Plays
Main articles: Sweeney Agonistes, Murder in the Cathedral, The Rock (play), The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman

With the important exception of Four Quartets, Eliot directed much of his creative energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in The Waste Land. In a 1933 lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility . . . . He would like to be something of a popular entertainer, and be able to think his own thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which to do it."[50] After The Waste Land (1922), he wrote that he was "now feeling toward a new form and style." One project he had in mind was writing a play in verse, using some of the rhythms of early jazz. The play featured "Sweeney," a character who had appeared in a number of his poems. Although Eliot did not finish the play, he did publish two scenes from the piece. These scenes, titled Fragment of a Prologue (1926) and Fragment of an Agon (1927), were published together in 1932 as Sweeney Agonistes. Although Eliot noted that this was not intended to be a one-act play, it is sometimes performed as one.[11] A pageant play by Eliot called The Rock was performed in 1934 for the benefit of churches in the Diocese of London. Much of it was a collaborative effort; Eliot accepted credit only for the authorship of one scene and the choruses.[11] George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had been instrumental in connecting Eliot with producer E. Martin Browne for the production of The Rock, and later commissioned Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This one, Murder in the Cathedral, concerning the death of the martyr, Thomas Becket, was more under Eliot's control. Eliot biographer Peter Ackroyd comments that "for [Eliot], Murder in the Cathedral and succeeding verse plays offered a double advantage; it allowed him to practice poetry but it also offered a convenient home for his religious sensibility."[51] After this, he worked on more "commercial" plays for more general audiences: The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk, (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958). The Broadway production in New York of The Cocktail Party received the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. Regarding his method of playwriting, Eliot explained, "If I set out to write a play, I start by an act of choice. I settle upon a particular emotional situation, out of which characters and a plot will emerge. And then lines of poetry may come into being: not from the original impulse but from a secondary stimulation of the unconscious mind."[52]

[edit] Literary criticism

Eliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism, strongly influencing the school of New Criticism. While somewhat self-deprecating and minimizing of his work he once said his criticism was merely a by-product of his private poetry-workshopEliot is considered by some to be one of the greatest literary critics of the twentieth century.[53] The

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critic William Empson once said, "I do not know for certain how much of my own mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind."[54] In his critical essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past.[53] This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous works, a simultaneous order of works (i.e., "tradition"). Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poem The Waste Land.[55] Also important to New Criticism was the ideaas articulated in Eliots essay "Hamlet and His Problemsof an objective correlative, which posits a connection among the words of the text and events, states of mind, and experiences.[56] This notion concedes that a poem means what it says, but suggests that there can be a non-subjective judgment based on different readers differentbut perhaps corollaryinterpretations of a work. More generally, New Critics took a cue from Eliot in regard to his classical ideals and his religious thought; his attention to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century; his deprecation of the Romantics, especially Shelley; his proposition that good poems constitute not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence that poetsat present must be difficult.[57] Eliots essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. Eliot particularly praised the metaphysical poets' ability to show experience as both psychological and sensual, while at the same time infusing this portrayal within Eliot's viewwit and uniqueness. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets," along with giving new significance and attention to metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of "unified sensibility," which is considered by some to mean the same thing as the term "metaphysical."[58][59] His 1922 poem The Waste Land[60] also can be better understood in light of his work as a critic. He had argued that a poet must write programmatic criticism," that is, a poet should write to advance his own interests rather than to advance historical scholarship." Viewed from Eliot's critical lens, The Waste Land likely shows his personal despair about World War I rather than an objective historical understanding of it.[61] In 1946, Eliot was a member of a group otherwise composed of senior clergy which produced a report entitled "Catholicity" published in 1947 as a contribution to the process which resulted in the Church of England's Report on Doctrine (1948). In 1958, the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed Eliot to a commission that produced The Revised Psalter (1963). A harsh critic of Eliot, C. S. Lewis, was also a member of the commission, where their antagonism turned into a friendship.[62]

[edit] Critical reception

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[edit] Responses to his poetry

The initial critical response to Eliot's poetry, particularly "The Waste Land," was mixed. Some critics, like Edmund Wilson, Conrad Aiken, and Gilbert Seldes thought it was the best poetry being written in the English language while others thought it was esoteric and wilfully difficult. Edmund Wilson, being one of the critics who praised Eliot, called him "one of our only authentic poets."[63] Nevertheless, it should be noted that Wilson also pointed out some of Eliot's weaknesses as a poet. In regard to "The Waste Land," Wilson admits its flaws ("its lack of structural unity"), but concluded, "I doubt whether there is a single other poem of equal length by a contemporary American which displays so high and so varied a mastery of English verse."[63] Other critics, like Charles Powell, were decidedly negative in their criticism of Eliot, calling his poems incomprehensible.[64] And the writers of Time magazine were similarly baffled by a challenging poem like "The Waste Land."[65] Of course, there were some critics, like John Crowe Ransom, who wrote mostly negative criticisms of Eliot's work but who also had some positive things to say. For instance, though Ransom negatively criticised "The Waste Land" for its "extreme disconnection," Ransom was not completely condemnatory of Eliot's work (like Powell) and admitted that Eliot was a talented poet.[66] Addressing some of the common criticisms directed against "The Waste Land" at the time, Gilbert Seldes stated, "It seems at first sight remarkably disconnected and confused . . . [however] a closer view of the poem does more than illuminate the difficulties; it reveals the hidden form of the work, [and] indicates how each thing falls into place."[67] Writing in 2003, philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, "T. S. Eliot was indisputably the greatest poet writing in English in the twentieth century. He was also the most revolutionary Anglophone literary critic since Samuel Johnson, and the most influential religious thinker in the Anglican tradition since the Wesleyan movement. His social and political vision is contained in all his writings, and has been absorbed and reabsorbed by generations of English and American readers, upon whom it exerts an almost mystical fascinationeven when they are moved, as many are, to reject it".[68]

[edit] Allegations of anti-Semitism

The depiction of Jews in some of Eliot's poems has led several critics to accuse him of antiSemitism. This case has been presented most forcefully in a study by Anthony Julius: T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996).[69][70] In "Gerontion," Eliot writes, in the voice of the poem's elderly narrator, "And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner [of my building] / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp."[71] Another well-known example appears in the poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar." In this poem, Eliot wrote, "The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs."[72] Interpreting the line as an indirect comparison of Jews to rats, Julius writes, "The antiSemitism is unmistakable. It reaches out like a clear signal to the reader." Julius's viewpoint has been supported by literary critics such as Harold Bloom[73], Christopher Ricks,[74] George Steiner,[74] and James Fenton.[74] In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933, published under the title

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After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934), Eliot wrote of societal tradition and coherence, "What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of freethinking Jews undesirable."[75] Eliot never re-published this book nor the lecture.[74] Craig Raine, in his books In Defence of T.S. Eliot (2001) and T. S. Eliot (2006), has sought to defend Eliot from the charge of anti-Semitism. Reviewing Raine's 2006 book, Paul Dean stated that he was not convinced by Raine's argument though he concluded, "Ultimately, as both Raine and, to do him justice, Julius insist, however much Eliot may have been compromised as a person, as we all are in our several ways, his greatness as a poet remains."[74]

[edit] Awards
Further information: Cultural depictions of T. S. Eliot

Order of Merit (awarded by King George VI (United Kingdom), 1948)[76] Nobel Prize for Literature "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry" (Stockholm, 1948)[5] Officier de la Legion d'Honneur (1951) Hanseatic Goethe Prize (Hamburg, 1955) Dante Medal (Florence, 1959) Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1960) Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964) Thirteen honorary doctorates (including Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and Harvard) Tony Award in 1950 for Best Play: The Broadway production of The Cocktail Party Two posthumous Tony Awards (1983) for his poems used in the musical Cats Eliot College of the University of Kent, England, named after him Celebrated on commemorative postage stamps A star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame

[edit] Works
Main article: T. S. Eliot bibliography

[edit] Earliest Works

Prose
o o o o o o o

"The Birds of Prey" (a short story; 1905)[77] "A Tale of a Whale" (a short story; 1905) "The Man Who Was King" (a short story; 1905)[78] [A review of] "The Wine and the Puritans" (1909) "The Point of View" (1909) "Gentlemen and Seamen" (1909) [A review of] "Egoist" (1909)

Poems
o o o o

"A Fable for Feasters" (1905) "[A Lyric:]'If Time and Space as Sages say'" (1905) "[At Graduation 1905]" (1905) "Song:'If space and time,as sages say'" (1907)

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o o o o o o o o

"Before Morning" (1908) "Circe's Palace" (1908) "Song: 'When we came home across the hill'" (1909) "On a Portrait" (1909) "Nocturne" (1909) "Humoresque" (1910) "Spleen" (1910) "[Class]Ode" (1910)

[edit] Poetry

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) o The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock o Portrait of a Lady (poem) o Aunt Helen Poems (1920) o Gerontion o Sweeney Among the Nightingales o "The Hippopotamus" o "Whispers of Immortality" o "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" o "A Cooking Egg" The Waste Land (1922) The Hollow Men (1925) Ariel Poems (19271954) o The Journey of the Magi (1927) Ash Wednesday (1930) Coriolan (1931) Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs and Billy M'Caw: The Remarkable Parrot (1939) in The Queen's Book of the Red Cross Four Quartets (1945)

[edit] Plays

Sweeney Agonistes (published in 1926, first performed in 1934) The Rock (1934) Murder in the Cathedral (1935) The Family Reunion (1939) The Cocktail Party (1949) The Confidential Clerk (1953) The Elder Statesman (first performed in 1958, published in 1959)

[edit] Nonfiction

Christianity & Culture (1939, 1948) The Second-Order Mind (1920) Tradition and the Individual Talent (1920) The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920) o "Hamlet and His Problems"

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Homage to John Dryden (1924) Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1928) For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) Dante (1929) Selected Essays, 19171932 (1932) The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) After Strange Gods (1934) Elizabethan Essays (1934) Essays Ancient and Modern (1936) The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941) made by Eliot, with an essay on Rudyard Kipling, London, Faber and Faber. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) Poetry and Drama (1951) The Three Voices of Poetry (1954) The Frontiers of Criticism (1956) On Poetry and Poets (1957)

[edit] Posthumous publications

To Criticize the Critic (1965) The Waste Land: Facsimile Edition (1974) Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 (1996)

[edit] Critical editions

Collected Poems, 1909-1962 (1963) online edition; also excerpt and text search Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Illustrated Edition (1982) excerpt and text search Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot edited by Frank Kermode (1975) excerpt and text search The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions) edited by Michael North (2000) excerpt and text search Selected essays (1932); enlarged (1960) The letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (1988) The letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot, Volume 2: 1923-1925 (2009)

[edit] Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. ^ Hart Crane (1899-1932) ^ Influences by Seamus Heaney, Bostonreview.net, accessed August 3, 2009. ^ Collini, Stefan (November 7, 2009). "I cannot go on". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/07/eliot-letters-book-review. Retrieved April 9, 2012. abcdefghi ^ Thomas Stearns Eliot, Encyclopaedia Britannica, accessed November 7, 2009. ab ^ "The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 - T.S. Eliot", Nobelprize.org, taken from Frenz, Horst (ed). Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967. Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969, accessed 6 March 2012. ^ Ronald Bush, T.S. Eliot: the modernist in history, (New York, 1991), p. 72 ^ Worthen, John (2009). T.S. Eliot: A Short Biography. London: Haus Publishing. pp. 9. ^ Sencourt, Robert (1971). T.S. Eliot, A Memoir. London: Garnstone Limited. pp. 18. ^ Letter to Marquis Childs quoted in St. Louis Post Dispatch (15 October 1930) and in the address "American Literature and the American Language" delivered at Washington University (9 June 1953), published in Washington University Studies, New Series: Literature and Language, no. 23 (St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1953), p. 6.

6. 7. 8. 9.

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10. ^ Hall, Donald. The Art of Poetry No. 1, The Paris Review, Issue 21, Spring-Summer 1959, accessed November 29, 2011. abc 11. ^ Gallup, Donald. T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (A Revised and Extended Edition), Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1969. 12. ^ Eliot, T.S. Poems Written in Early Youth, John Davy Hayward, ed. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1967 13. ^ Narita, Tatsushi,'The Young T. S. Eliot and Alien Cultures: His Philippine Interactions', The Review of English Studies, New Series, vol. 45, no. 180, 1994, pp. 523-525 14. ^ Bush, Ronald,"The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/ Literary Politics." In Prehistories of the Future, ed. Elzar Barkan and Ronald Bush, Stanford University Press,(1995), pp. 3-5; 25-31. 15. ^ Marsh, Alex and Elizabeth Daemer, "Pound and T. S. Eliot," American Literary Scholarship, 2005, 182. ab 16. ^ Kermode, Frank. "Introduction" to The Waste Land and Other Poems, Penguin Classics, 2003. 17. ^ Perl, Jeffry M. and Andrew P. Tuck. "The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the Significance of T. S. Eliot's Indic Studies", Philosophy East & West V. 35 No. 2, April 1985, pp. 116131. ab 18. ^ Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: The Life of Vivienne Eliot, First Wife of T. S. Eliot, Knopf Publishing Group, p. 1. 19. ^ Worthen, John (2009). T.S. Eliot: A Short Biography. London: Haus Publishing. pp. 3436. 20. ^ For a reading of the dissertation, see Brazeal, Gregory (Fall 2007). "The Alleged Pragmatism of T.S. Eliot". Philosophy & Literature 31 (1): 248264. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1738642. Retrieved January 17, 2011. 21. ^ Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898-1922. p. 75. 22. ^ Richardson, John, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters. Random House, 2001, p. 20. 23. ^ Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. Knopf Publishing Group, 2001, p. 17. 24. ^ The Letters of T.S. Eliot: Volume 1, 1898-1922. London: Faber and Faber. 1988. pp. 533. 25. ^ Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898-192, p. xvii. 26. ^ Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. pp. 492495 27. ^ T.S. Eliot. Voices and Visions Series. New York Center of Visual History: PBS, 1988.[1] 28. ^ plaque on interior wall of Saint Stephen's 29. ^ obituary notice in Church and King, Vol. XVII, No. 4, February 28, 1965, p. 3. 30. ^ Specific quote is "The general point of view [of the essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion," in preface by T.S. Eliot to For Lancelot Andrewes: essays on style and order, (1929) 31. ^ Books: Royalist, Classicist, Anglo-Catholic, May 25, 1936, Time 32. ^ Eliot, T.S. (1986). On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber & Faber. p. 209. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/05710089836|05710089836]]. 33. ^ T.S. Eliot. Voices and Visions Series. New York Center of Visual History: PBS, 1988.[2] 34. ^ Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. Constable 2001, p. 561. 35. ^ Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. Norton 1998, p. 455. 36. ^ Gordon, Jane. The University of Verse, The New York Times, October 16, 2005; Wesleyan University Press timeline, 1957 37. ^ http://www.tabathayeatts.com/Poets%20Corner.jpg 38. ^ Eliot, T. S. "Letter to J. H. Woods, April 21, 1919." The Letters of T. S. Eliot, vol. I. Valerie Eliot, ed. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988, p. 285. 39. ^ "''T. S. Eliot: The Harvard Advocate Poems''. Retrieved 5 February 2007". Theworld.com. http://www.theworld.com/~raparker/exploring/tseliot/works/poems/eliot-harvard-poems.html. Retrieved 2009-08-03. 40. ^ Hall, Donald (Spring-Summer 1959). "The Art of Poetry No. 1". The Paris Review. http://www.parisreview.com/media/4738_ELIOT4.pdf. Retrieved November 7, 2009. 41. ^ Waugh, Arthur. The New Poetry, Quarterly Review, October 1916, citing the Times Literary Supplement June 21, 1917, no. 805, 299; Wagner, Erica (2001) "An eruption of fury", The Guardian, letters to the editor, September 4, 2001. Wagner omits the word "very" from the quote. 42. ^ Miller, James H., Jr. (2005). T. S. Eliot: the making of an American poet, 1888-1922. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. pp. 387388. ISBN 0-271-02681-2. 43. ^ The letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1, p. 596

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44. ^ MacCabe, Colin. T. S. Eliot. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2006. 45. ^ Wilson, Edmund. "Review of Ash Wednesday," New Republic, August 20, 1930. 46. ^ See, for instance, the biographically oriented work of one of Eliot's editors and major critics, Ronald Schuchard. 47. ^ Grant, Michael (ed.). T. S. Eliot: the Critical Heritage. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. 48. ^ " 'Ulysses', Order, and Myth", Selected Essays T. S. Eliot (orig 1923). 49. ^ Untermeyer, Louis. Modern American Poetry. Hartcourt Brace, 1950, pp. 395-396. 50. ^ Eliot, T. S. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Harvard University Press, 1933 (penultimate paragraph) 51. ^ T.S. Eliot. Voices and Visions Series. New York Center of Visual History: PBS, 1988.[3] 52. ^ T.S. Eliot. Voices and Visions Series. New York Center of Visual History: PBS, 1988.[4] ab 53. ^ "Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot, T. S. 1920. ''The Sacred Wood''". Bartleby.com. http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html. Retrieved 2009-08-03. 54. ^ quoted in Roger Kimball, "A Craving for Reality," The New Criterion Vol. 18, 1999 55. ^ Dirk Weidmann: And I Tiresias have foresuffered all.... In: LITERATURA 51 (3), 2009, pp.98-108. 56. ^ "Hamlet and His Problems. Eliot, T. S. 1920. ''The Sacred Wood''". Bartleby.com. http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw9.html. Retrieved 2009-08-03. 57. ^ Burt, Steven and Lewin, Jennifer. "Poetry and the New Criticism." A Companion to TwentiethCentury Poetry, Neil Roberts, ed. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. p. 154 58. ^ "Project MUSE". Muse.jhu.edu. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_modern_literature/v027/27.1baker.html. Retrieved 200908-03. 59. ^ A. E. Malloch, "The Unified Sensibility and Metaphysical Poetry", College English, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Nov., 1953), pp. 95-101 60. ^ "Eliot, T. S. 1922. ''The Waste Land''". Bartleby.com. http://www.bartleby.com/201/1.html. Retrieved 2009-08-03. 61. ^ "T. S. Eliot :: The Waste Land and criticism - ''Britannica Online Encyclopedia''". Britannica.com. 1965-01-04. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-2088/TS-Eliot. Retrieved 2009-08-03. 62. ^ Spruyt, Bart Jan. "One of the enemy: C. S. Lewis on the very great evil of T. S. Eliot's work", lecture to the conference Order and Liberty in the American Tradition, July 28August 3, 2004, Oxford University, accessed November 7, 2009. ab 63. ^ Wilson, Edmund. "The Poetry of Drouth." The Dial 73. December 1922. 611-16. 64. ^ Powell, Charles. "So Much Waste Paper." Manchester Guardian. October 31, 1923. 65. ^ Time. March 3, 1923, 12. 66. ^ Ransom, John Crowe. "Waste Lands." New York Evening Post Literary Review. July 14, 1923. 825-26. 67. ^ Seldes, Gilbert. "T. S. Eliot." Nation. 6 December 1922. 614-616. 68. ^ Scruton, Roger (Fall 2003/Spring 2004). "First Principles T. S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor". firstprinciplesjournal.com. http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=495&theme=home&page=1&loc=b&type =cttf. Retrieved 2012-07-24. 69. ^ Gross, John. Was T.S. Eliot a Scoundrel?, Commentary magazine, November 1996 70. ^ Anthony, Julius. T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Cambridge University Press, 1996 ISBN 0-521-58673-9 71. ^ Eliot, T.S. "Gerontion." Collected Poems. Harcourt, 1963. 72. ^ Eliot, T.S. "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar." Collected Poems. Harcourt, 1963. 73. ^ Bloom, Harold (May 7, 2010). "The Jewish Question: British Anti-Semitism". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Bloom-t.html. Retrieved April 9, 2012. abcde 74. ^ Dean, Paul (April 2007). "Academimic: on Craig Raine's T.S. Eliot". The New Criterion. http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/academimic-3143. Retrieved 7 June 2011. 75. ^ Kirk, Russell. "T. S. Eliot on Literary Morals: On T. S. Eliot's After Strange Gods", Touchstone Magazine, volume 10, issue 4, Fall 1997. 76. ^ "Poet T.S. Eliot Dies in London". This Day in History. http://www.history.com/this-day-inhistory/poet-ts-eliot-dies-in-london. Retrieved 16 February 2012. 77. ^ The three short stories published in the Smith Academy Record (1905) have never been recollected in any form and have virtually been neglected.

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78. ^ c.f. Rudyard Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King"

[edit] Further reading

Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. (1984) Ali, Ahmed. Mr. Eliot's Penny World of Dreams: An Essay in the Interpretation of T.S. Eliot's Poetry, Published for the Lucknow University by New Book Co., Bombay, P.S. King & Staples Ltd., Westminster, London, 1942, pages 138. Alldritt, Keith. Eliot's Four Quartets: Poetry as Chamber Music. Woburn Press, 1978. Asher, Kenneth T. S. Eliot and Ideology (1995) Brand, Clinton A. "The Voice of This Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T. S. Eliot," Modern Age Volume 45, Number 4; Fall 2003 online edition, conservative perspective Brown, Alec. The Lyrical Impulse in Eliot's Poetry, Scrutinies vol. 2. Bush, Ronald. T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. (1984) Bush, Ronald, 'The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/ Literary Politics'. In Prehistories of the Future, ed. Elzar Barkan and Ronald Bush, Stanford University Press. (1995). Claes, Paul, A Commentary on T.S. Eliot's Poem The Waste Land: The Infertility Theme and the Poet's Unhappy Marriage, Lewiston N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2012. Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot. (1987).* Christensen, Karen. "Dear Mrs. Eliot," The Guardian Review. (29 January 2005). Dawson, J.L., P.D. Holland & D.J. McKitterick, A Concordance to 'The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot'. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Forster, E. M. Essay on T. S. Eliot, in Life and Letters, June 1929. Gardner, Helen. The Composition of Four Quartets. (1978). ---The Art of T. S. Eliot. (1949) Gordon, Lyndall. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. (1998) Harding, W. D. T. S. Eliot, 1925-1935, Scrutiny, September 1936: A Review. Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. University Press of Mississippi (1978). ---. T. S. Eliot's Parisian Year. University Press of Florida (2009). Julius, Anthony. T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. Cambridge University Press (1995) Kelleter, Frank. Die Moderne und der Tod: Edgar Allan PoeT. S. EliotSamuel Beckett. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1998. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. (1969) ---, editor, T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall. (1962) Kirk, Russell Eliot and His Age: T. S, Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. (Introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr.). Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Republication of the revised second edition, 2008. Kirsch, Adam. "Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot", The American Scholar. Vol 67, Iss 3. Summer 1998 Lal, P. (Editor), T. S. Eliot: Homage from India: A Commemoration Volume of 55 Essays & Elegies, Writer's Workshop Calcutta, 1965. The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Ed. by Valerie Eliot. Vol. I, 1898-1922. San Diego [etc.] 1988. Vol. 2, 1923-1925. Edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, London, Faber, 2009. ISBN 978-0571-14081-7 Levy, William Turner and Victor Scherle. Affectionately, T. S. Eliot: The Story of a Friendship: 1947-1965. (1968). Matthews, T. S. Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot. (1973) Maxwell, D. E. S. The Poetry of T. S. Eliot, Routledge and Keagan Paul. (1960).

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Miller, James E., Jr. T. S. Eliot. The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005. Narita, Tatsushi. "The Young T. S. Eliot and Alien Cultures: His Philippine Interactions", The Review of English Studies. Vol 45. (1994) Narita, Tatsushi. T. S. Eliot and his Youth as 'A Literary Columbus', Nagoya: Kougaku Shuppan, 2011. North, Michael (ed.) The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions). New York: W.W. Norton, 2000. Quillian, William H. Hamlet and the New Poetic: James Joyce and T. S. Eliot. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press (1983). Raine, Craig. T. S. Eliot. Oxford University Press (2006). Ricks, Christopher.T. S. Eliot and Prejudice. (1988). Robinson, Ian "The English Prophets", The Brynmill Press Ltd (2001) Ronnick, Michele Valerie, "Eliot's 'The Hollow Men'", The Explicator. Vol 56, Iss 2. (1998) Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. (1999). Scofield, Dr. Martin, "T.S. Eliot: The Poems", Cambridge University Press. (1988). Seferis, George. "Introduction to T. S. Eliot" in Modernism/modernity 16:1 ([5] January 2009), 146-60. Sencourt, Robert. T. S. Eliot: A Memoir. (1971) Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. (2001). Sinha, Arun Kumar and Vikram, Kumar. T. S. Eliot: An Intensive Study of Selected Poems, Spectrum Books Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi, (2005). Spender, Stephen. T. S. Eliot. (1975) Spurr, Barry, Anglo-Catholic in Religion: T. S. Eliot and Christianity, The Lutterworth Press (2009) Tate, Allen, editor. T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, First published in 1966 - republished by Penguin 1971. Weidmann, Dirk. And I Tiresias have foresuffered all: More Than Allusions to Ovid in T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land?. In: LITERATURA 51 (3), 2009, pp. 98108.