Thomas Stearns Eliot

Notes

Childhood

obsessed with books

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.

• studied Greek, Latin, German and French

• started writing poetry at school

• 1906 – 1909 studied Philosophy at Harvard(Bachelor’s degree in three years)

1908 discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine

• worked as a philosophy assistant at Harvard

• 1910 - 1911 studied Philosophy at the Sorbonne, Paris

Henri Bergson’s lectures Alain Fournier’s poetry

1911 – 1914 back at Harvard (Indian philosophy and Sanskrit)

• was awarded a scholarship for Merton College, Oxford

• first went to Germany (wanted to take a course there), but WWI made him go to Oxford immediately

• didn’t like university life; moved to London, met Ezra Pound

• married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in June 1915• worked as a teacher

• …To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.

• 1917 started working at Lloyds Bank• Paris, August 1920 met James Joyce• 1925 left his bank post, joined the publishers

Faber and Faber• June 1927 converted to Anglicanism (+ became a

British subject)• defined himself “classicist in literature,

royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”

• 1932 separated from his wife• 1947 she died, while in a mental hospital• 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his

outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry"

• January 1957 (at 68) married Esmé Valerie Fletcher (32)

• died in January 1965• since his death his wife has preserved his

legacy, edited his letters, published a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land

Depersonalization

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.(...) 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. (...) 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. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done.

(Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919)

Objective correlative

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

(Elizabethan Dramatists: Hamlet, 1919)

The mythical method

It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. (...) Psychology, ethnology, and "The Golden Bough" (James Frazer, 1890) have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of the narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. (Ulysses, Order and Myth, 1923)

Tradition, time and literature

Tradition involves the historical sense (...) which involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man 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 tradition of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. (...) 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.

(Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919)

PoetryPoetry is of course not to be defined by its uses. (...) It

may effect revolutions in sensibility such as are periodically needed; it may help to break up the conventional modes of perception and valuation which are perpetually forming, and make people see the world afresh, or some new part of it. It may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feeelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world. But to say all this is only to say what you know already, if you have felt poetry and thought about your feelings.

(The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism)

A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes. (...) In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered… .

(The Metaphysical Poets, 1921)

The Waste Land

Nam Sybillam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meisvidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:Σιβυλλα τι ϑελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν ϑελω.

I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. …

a picture of a materialistic age dying of lack of belief in anything

analogy between • aridity/sterility of the earth• crisis of civilization • failure of the human condition

a sort of door into European literature: a concise summary of a civilization contrasted sharply with the present age

THEMES

• meaningful link with the past mythical historical however, significantthe juxtaposition with the present shows it as

squalid, lifeless, meaningless

• emptiness, sterility of modern life

• emptiness, sterility of modern life

natural: the land is barrensocial: no real communication is

possible; inability to lovespiritual: no religious values give

effective answers; materialism

STRUCTURE

• no “plot”, a series of images, often ambiguous, apparently disconnected, open to different interpretations

• link: association of ideas

a DIFFICULT poem (essay The Metaphysical Poets)

• lack of explicit links• rapidly shifting point of view• unfinished thoughts• mingling of past, present and future• frequent quotes from European + Asian

literatures• lines echoing virtually all English poets of the past• religious symbolism

• language used (verse often sounds like prose; lyrical, narrative, autobiographical passages, different tones)

• no regular metrical pattern (a kind of free verse derived from blank verse)