T.S. Eliot ranks with
William Butler Yeats as the
greatest English language poet of the 20th Century and was certainly
the most influential. He was born Thomas Stearns Eliot into the bosom
of a respectable middle class family on September 26, 1888 in St.
Louis, Missouri. The family had roots in New England, and Eliot spent
summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts. There was little doubt that he
would matriculate at Harvard -- his cousin, Charles William Eliot was
the 24th president of Harvard and turned it into a great research
university during his 40-year-tenure -- and after graduating from the
Milton Academy in 1906, it was off to Cambridge (on the left sight of
The Pond) he went. (His cousin Charles spent his last three years as
president during Thomas' first three years at the venerable
institution.)
Though deeply committed to literature, Eliot studied philosophy with
George Santayana, William James, and
Bertrand Russell (who was a visiting
professor) at Harvard. Eliot completed his undergraduate degree in
three instead of the usual four years and stayed on at Harvard as a
teaching assistant for another year. He then studied philosophy at the
Sorbonne in Paris for a year before returning to Harvard in 1911 to get
his PhD.
He decided to spend 1914-15 at the University of Marburg in Germany,
but his plans were dashed by the declaration of the First World War. He
won a scholarship to attend Merton College at Oxford and that changed
his life as it put him in the vicinity of London. In London, he met
Ezra Pound, Il miglior fabbro (Italian for
"the better craftsman," the dedication Eliot gave Pound on the title
page of "The Waste Land", which Pound edited), who championed him and
provided him with vital contacts. Though Eliot completed his doctoral
dissertation, he never returned to Harvard to defend it, so was never
awarded his PhD.
Eliot had come to loathe academia and supported himself by working in a
bank as he forged his literary reputation. (Later, he became an editor
at the London publisher Faber and Faber.) Enamored of England, he spent
the rest of his life there, becoming a British subject in 1927. Deeply
conservative, the rigid class hierarchies of England appealed to him.
He eschewed the Unitarianism of his family and became an ardent
Anglo-Catholic within the bosom of the Church of England. Time Magazine
titled its review of his "Collected Poems" in 1936 "Royalist,
Classicist, Anglo-Catholic".
Eliot's first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom he wed in 1915
(partly to gain residency in England), was a disaster. Vivienne's
biographer, Carole Seymour-Jones, attributed the strain in the marriage
partly to what she contends was Eliot's closet homosexuality, though
Vivienne's mental instability and poor health were major factors in the
deterioration of their relationship. Eliot eventually had to
institutionalize her. Eliot also suffered from mental problems and
suffered a breakdown in 1921 and was treated at a sanitarium in
Switzerland.
The brilliant though emotionally troubled artist, whom the New York
Times in its obituary called "the poet of gray melancholy,", created
some of the greatest masterpieces of English literature, beginning with
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (written in America and published
in 1915) and including "Gerontion "(1920), "The Waste Land" (1922) and
"The Hollow Men" (1925). The "Waste Land" was a watershed of literary
modernism and revolutionized Anglo-American letters.
In addition to his great poetry, Eliot was an accomplished playwright,
best known for
"Murder in the Cathedral (1951)"
(1935), "The Family Reunion" (1935), and "The Cocktail Party" (1949).
He won a Tony Award for Best Play when "The Cocktail Party" was
produced on Broadway in 1950. Thirty-three years later, Eliot won two
more Tony Awards, posthumously, for "Cats", cited for Best Book of a
Musical and Best Original Score as the lyricist. Based on his book of
whimsical poems, "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats", the musical
"Cats" was the longest-running show in Broadway history, racking up
7,485 performances when it closed its 18-year-run in the year 2000.
(Its record eventually was overtaken by
Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical
version of
Das Phantom der Oper (1925).)
Eliot also busied himself as belletrist and essayist. While his belles
lettres on literary topics are valuable, his essays on the human
condition are less so due to his illiberal point of view. Fittingly,
upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, the Swedish
Academy lauded Eliot "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to
present-day poetry".
Viv died in 1947. Ten years later, the 68 year-old Eliot married Esmé
Valerie Fletcher, who was 36 years his junior. Esmé had been his
secretary at Faber and Faber since 1949 and would be his widow when he
died on January 4, 1965 at the age of 76.
