Modern: T.S. Eliot

• 1888-1965

Though a member of a prominent New England family, T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis and lived there until 1898 when his family moved back to Boston. Eliot took his A.B. and M.A. at Harvard and completed most of the requirements for his doctorate in philosophy but never completed the degree. In 1914, he left for Europe and England and never returned to America to live. He spent most of his time thereafter in London, where he married (unhappily) and became a leading poet and literary critic in the literary establishments of England and America.

Like Pound in The Cantos, Eliot chose to construct his poetry, especially up through The Waste Land (1922), from bits and pieces gleaned from his reading. These fragments function as images of a sort and reflect the crisis of western culture as Eliot perceived it: alienation from nature and community and loss of a sense of purpose. Unlike Pound (and other writers), however, who thought that poetry could take the place of religion and save culture and the individual, Eliot came to believe, in his later period, after his own conversation to Orthodox Anglicanism, that poetry could be best redirect and perhaps refresh the individual's search for religious renewal. In his earlier period, he saw poetry as a means of giving an ultimate definition to the horror, the ugliness, and the boredom of the endless, purposeless, monotonous circling of modern life. Eliot's poetry, therefore, has two purposes: to dramatize the emptiness of modern life (up through TWL), and to refresh and redirect the individual in a search for purpose and meaning (after TWL) through religious belief that might bring head, heart, intellect, and emotion back into harmony and conjunction.

For Eliot, the world is a place of unreal fantasies and unreliable and transitory sensory stimulation, and the people who populate it have been numbed and drugged into a sort of half-life where they prefer to remain rather than risk being awakened to full consciousness of their desperation. The poetry of his early period can be seen as marking the end of the viability of Whitman's "simple, separate person." Eliot instead portrays the single soul broken under the pressures of modern life and alienated from the traditions and values of the past.

Eliot is not strictly an Imagist poet, but he devised a theory of the "objective correlative," based on a type of imagery he observed in the English metaphysical and French symbolist poets, which consists of an object, some concrete particular in a poem, that calls forth in the reader a particular emotion.