1. Thomas Stearns Eliot

2. Life of T. S. Eliot
Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888 in a traditional Calvinist family
Paternal grandfather founder of Washington University and founder of Unitarianism
Undergraduate ( ) at Harvard; graduate ( ) work at Harvard under the supervision of George Santayana and Irving Babbitt; Oxford ( )
Beginning writing poetry as a college student

3. Life of T. S. Eliot
Greatly influenced in 1908 by British metaphysical poetry like that of John Donne in the 17th century (its irony, witty metaphors); by French symbolists like Jules LaForgue and Charles Pierre Baudelaire (their indirect, implicit symbols as in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
Works before 1909 basically victorian (Genteel tradition)

4. Life of T. S. Eliot Settlement in London in 1915
1915, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Waste Land published on Criterion Eliot edited, proofread by Ezra Pound
A British citizen in 1927 and beginning writing poems about religions, different from earlier poems about the decadence of western spirit and culture

5. Important Poetic Works
The Waste Land (1922)
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
Poems (1920)
Ash-Wednesday (1930)
The Four Quartets ( ), philosophical and religious meditative poems
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

6. T. S. Eliot’s Literary Criticism
Tradition and the Individual Talent (1917): anti-romantic; poetry and earlier poetic works
Selected Essays: (1932)
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
On Poets and Poetry (1957)
Objective correlative
New Criticism (analysis of each poem for imagery, allusion, ambiguity)

7. Eliot’s Literary Features
Symbolism: ordinary objects, events, etc. having symbolic significance
Mysterious in content; distorted spiritual world in western world after WWI
Rich in (biblical, literary, cultural, humanistic, archeological) allusions
No fixed poetic form and meter
Changing language style: spoken, written, simple, complicated
Lyric or satirical or critical