THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

Eliot was descended from a distinguish New England family that had relocated to St. Louis, Mo. His family allowed him the widest education available in his time, with no influence from his father to be "practical" and go into business. From Smith Academy in St. Louis he went to Milton, in Massachusetts; from Milton he entered Harvard in 1906; he was graduated B.A. in 1909, after three instead of the usual four years. The men who influenced him at Harvard were George Santayana, the philosopher and the poet, and the critic Irving Babbitt. From Babbitt h 737i82h e derived an anti-Romantic attitude that amplified  by his later readings of British philosophers F.H. Bradley and T.E. Hulme, lasted through his life. In the academic year 1909-10 he was an assistant in the philosophy at Harvard.

He spent a year in France, attending Henri Bergson's lectures in philosophy at the Sorbonne. His study of the poetry of Dante, of the English writers John Webster and John Donne, and the French symbolist Jules Laforgue helped him to find his own style. By 1916 he had finished , in Europe, a dissertation entitled Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley. But World War I intervened, and he never returned to Harvard to take the final oral examination for the Ph.D. degree. In 1914 Eliot met and began a close association with the American poet Ezra Pound.

Eloit was to pursue four careers: editor, dramatist, literary critic, and philosophical poet. He was probably the most erudite poet of his time in the English language. Eliot believed that the poet-critic must write "programmatic criticism"- that is, criticism that expresses the poet's own interests as a poet, quite different from historical scholarship, which stops at placing the poet in the background. Eliot's criticism created an atmosphere in which his own poetry could be better understood and appreciated.

In the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", appearing in the first critical volume, The Sacred Wood (1920) , Eliot asserts that tradition, as used by the poet, is not a mere repetition of the work of the immediate past ("novelty is better than repetition", he said); rather it comprises the whole of the European literature from Homer to the present. This point of view is "programmatic" in the sense that it disposes the reader to accept the revolutionary novelty of Eliot's polyglot quotations and serious parodies of other poets' styles in the Waste Land. For Eliot poetry is an indirect expression of the emotion or a series of sensations. All these human feelings can become poetry only filtered through a catalytic agent that is in fact the poet's mind. The concept of "pure poetry" is defined as the one that presents the most commonly shared feelings. This concept is based on "impersonality", that is "depersonalization" - the poet does not express his own individual personality but that of his own community.

This theory shows us that the interest is focus on the poem and not on the poet and in this way the poem becomes autonomous; it can exist in itself, but is also integrated in the literary tradition. History is therefore the link between the old and the new on two senses: chronologically it represents a flow and forms a simultaneous point of view, an accumulation of values from the continuous flow. Yet, tradition is not motionless, it changes every moment. Thus the poet's historic feeling is like a mixture of past and present consciousness. He sees the two concepts of past and present dialectically, there is no pure past and no pure present.

In the essay The Music of Poetry Eliot states that technique is bearer of signification. In a poem, music without meaning cannot exist. A poem implies meaning and rhythm. Even an ugly word can be poetical because music implies the capacity of the word to combine with other words in a giving context. Besides words the same system functions with themes and motifs. The critic's main occupation is to describe the individual style through two methods: analysis and analogy. Analysis is connected with the problems of the way in which the poet makes use of the vocabulary and syntax. Comparison refers to the reference of the work to tradition. With Eliot the aim of the critique on the text is the participative reading.

Eliot's criticism and poetry are so interwoven that it is difficult to discuss them separately. The Waste Land is Eliot's most famous poem. It consists of five sections and proceeds on a principle of "rhetorical discontinuity". It expresses the hopelessness and confusion of purpose of life in the secularized city. But The Waste Land is not a simple contrast of the heroic past with the degraded present; it is rather a timeless, simultaneous awareness of moral grandeur and moral evil. The recurrence of the theme of the failed sexual love shows the same despair, sustaining the burden of the poem: the couple in the hyacinth garden, the chess-playing, middle-class couple, the conversation of Lil and her friend, the "nymphs" and their friends (.), Sweeney and Mrs. Porter, the typist and the circle, the three women in London (.) the isolated consciousness who speaks to "my friend" of "a moment's surrender" and to an unnamed companion of how "your heart would have responded". Secondly, this idea is reinforced by a common and recurring landscape, the "dead land" of April and the desert of "stony rubbish" in The Burial of the Dead the "stony places", rock, sand and mountains, "exhausted wells" and arid plain of successive moment in What the Thunder Said; and the urban equivalents in "the brown fog of a winter dawn", "rat's alley", the "brown land" of the Thames's winter banks.There are several key words around which the whole is structured. For this poem the framework is made up of the stories, myths (Christian and pre-Christian) grouped on the ideas of fertility and sterility, death and rebirth.

In The Burial of the Dead the theme is resurrection. The first character of this part and the speaker is the blind Tiresias. In this waste land Tiresias is the Fisher King, but he also stands for the Grail Knight recollecting from his past the story with the hyacinth girl- a symbol of fertility. A primitive creed states that the hyacinths grow in the place where a young girl sat. The idea of love that appears here, sustained by the Grail legend, stands for knowledge in the body but in a spiritual sense. The most important memory of Tiresias as the Fisher King is his failure with the hyacinth girl. Madame Sosostris, on the other hand, stresses the contrast because she has a masculine name- Sosostris was a great king of Egypt in the twelfth dynasty. She partly symbolizes rebirth, but she is also a caricature of her predecessor the hyacinth girl. In her hands she holds a group of symbols identical in value with the hyacinths.

The second part entitled A Game of Chess is the exact opposite of the first section. Smith states that the subject is "sex without love". Eliot presents here a neurotic woman of fashion who stands for a symbol of lovelessness. He also reintroduces the term of blindness that is correlative with silence. Among the symbols of this section , there are fire- a symbol of dust , and water- of love.

In spite of its title The Fire Sermon is connected with the opposite element - water. The symbols water and fire represents impurity and purification. Water is presented in the poem as the Thames in two different periods in order to show the decadence of the modern period. The Elizabethan Thames implying grandeur, and beauty, and the present Thames meaning dirt and death.

In the fourth section Death by Water is seen as a moment of rest and calm although it refers to death. The whole poem implies a longing for death but only this part answers it, yet according to Martin Scofield there is no suggestion of resurrection.

Eliot considers that What the Thunder Said is the only part that justifies the whole it opens with vivid scenes of Christ's agony, but he is only suggesting Christ and Crucifixion as he is only suggesting the existing water, which is not in fact present. The whole poem implies a drama of consciousness on the background of a refusal to speak in the symbol of Hieronymo in the last section, Tiresias or Sybil with her sterile eternity.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, another important Eliot's poem, is the trip to the depth of Prufrock's being. Prufrock also describes the continuous flux of his inner states. The poem starts with an invitation that seems to be a "momentary dream": "Let us go then, you and I". Although the epigraph sends to Dante's Inferno and implicitly to Virgil who accompanied him, the "you" is Prufrock's alter ego, the image in the mirror. These can also be the two aspects of the same ego, the sensitive character and the outward self. This double existence finds its roots in a medieval struggle between the soul and the body. Prufrock wants to escape. His evasion starts with a description of the weather, turning his eyes to the street. The obsessive "known them all" makes Prufrock think of escaping his condition and he realizes that his action would disturb the universe. The whole poem is a to-and-fro movement5, inside and outside.

Prufrock's attempt to escape is also suggested by his identification with John the Baptist, Lazarus, with Hamlet. The line "No! I am not prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be- echoes the opening of Hamlet's soliloquy "To be or not to be". Hamlet's words suggest indecision while Prufrock firmly states his unheroic role in life.