T.S. Eliot 2
As one of America's first modernist poets, T. S. Eliot's unique style and subject matter would have a dramatic influence on writers for the century to come. Born in 1888 in St. Louis Mo. at the tail end of the "Cowboy era" he grew up in the more civilized industrial era of the early 20th century, a time of the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford. The Eliot family was endowed with some of the best intellectual and political connections in America of that time, and as a result went to only the best schools. By 1906 he was a freshman in Harvard, finishing his bachelors in only 3 years and studying philosophy in France from 1910 to 1914, the outbreak of war. In 1915 the verse magazine Poetry published Eliot's first notable piece, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. This was followed by other short poems such as 'Portrait of a Lady'. 'The Waste Land', which appeared in 1922, is considered by many to be his most challenging work (see American Literature). In 1927 Eliot became a British subject and was confirmed in the Church of England. His essays ('For Lancelot Andrewes', 1928) and his poetry ('Four Quartets', 1943) increasingly reflected this association with a traditional culture. His first drama was 'The Rock' (1934), a
T.S. Eliot once said that the largest difficulty facing poets today was form and that they must find "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." This idea that the world is chaos and only the structure of the poets prose can bring order to it is the driving force behind Eliots work. But yet, Eliot has often been criticized or admonished for not providing that very order he speaks of. Professor of English Melissa Sodemn said that most of his poems are "a dramatic monologue loosely bound together with a rambling psychological coherence." Eliot was a devout Christian and considered Christianity the fabric holding western society together. For him, the idea of a western society without a fundamental belief in a Supreme Being and unbreakable morals was simply unacceptable. He said, "I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology." This belief along with his political conservatism ironically goes directly against his often-liberal views of love, environment, and morals. These ideas are also what he is attacked most often for. His seeming inability to come up with a coherent and consistent philosophy is nether neither surprising nor important. It must be remembered that Eliot was a poet, not an essayist or philosopher. He was not out to create an intellectual revolution but to write works that caused people to simply consider and think, and his poetry was beautiful. In The WasteLand he was "highly concerned with the regeneration of the fragmented modern world" and used a more mythical touch, somewhat akin to Homer's Ulysses. Eliots viewed his giving the litera
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Approximate Word count = 1243
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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