Thomas Stearns Eliot

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Thomas Stearns Eliot

• Notes

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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.

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• studied Greek, Latin, German and French
• started writing poetry at school
• 1906 1909 studied Philosophy at Harvard
• (Bachelors 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

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• worked as a philosophy assistant at Harvard
• 1910 - 1911 studied Philosophy at the
  Sorbonne, Paris
• Henri Bergsons lectures
• Alain Fourniers poetry
• 1911 1914 back at Harvard (Indian philosophy
  and Sanskrit)

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• 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
• didnt like university life moved to London, met
  Ezra Pound
• married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in June 1915
• worked as a teacher

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• 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

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• 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

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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Poetry

• Poetry 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)

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• 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)

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The Waste Land

• Nam Sybillam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
• vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri
  dicerent
• S?ß???a t? ?e?e?? respondebat illa ap??a?e??
  ?e??.

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• 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.

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• 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

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THEMES

• meaningful link with the past
• mythical historical
• however, significant
• the juxtaposition with the present shows it as
  squalid, lifeless, meaningless
• emptiness, sterility of modern life

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• emptiness, sterility of modern life
• natural the land is barren
• social no real communication is possible
  inability to love
• spiritual no religious values give effective
  answers materialism

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STRUCTURE

• no plot, a series of images, often ambiguous,
  apparently disconnected, open to different
  interpretations
• link association of ideas

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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

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• 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)