Research Paper on Thomas Stearns Elliot

Introduction

TS Elliot comprehensively implies Thomas Stearns Elliot who spent his life as a creative artist who did various artworks. He was allowed with the broadest education that would be available during his time and did not encounter any influence of involving himself into the business from his father. He schooled at Smith Academy in St. Louis then went to Milton in Massachusetts and later joined Harvard in 1906 where he was awarded Bachelor of Arts in 1909 within three years instead of four years.

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Through his studies at Harvard, he happened to meet two professionals who influenced him; George Santayana the philosopher and poet, Irving Babbitt, the critic. Outwardly portrayed an anti-Romantic attitude that had been generated from Babbitt and later amplified the trait by his next reading of the British philosophers F.H Bradley and T.E. Hulme that lasted throughout his life. Academic year 1909/1910 he played the role of an assistant in philosophy at Harvard.

Generally, he was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic, a newspaperman and a leader of the modernist movement in poetry; The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quarters (1943). TS Elliot was born on 26th September in the year 1888 at St. Louis Missouri in the US where his family had relocated to, belonged to a prominent family well known as Boston Brahmin. Reaching at the age of 25 years of age he shifted to England in 1914 where he potentially established his work life and also married there. He died on 4th January in the year 1965 at England (London). In the year 1927 when was 39 years of age, he managed to emerge as the British subject and also rejected his American passport.

Elliot utilized a well-built impact on Anglo-American culture in the era of 1920 to late in the century. Through his investigation in expression, style, and the way he used to make verses and regenerate English poetry wherein a sequence of analytical essays he stunned the outdated orthodoxies and constructed new ones. The publication of Four Quarters brought about his fame identified as the prominent English poet as well as a scholar wherein 1948 he received a prize for both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Within a length of one year, Elliot spent in France where he managed to attend Henri Bergson's lectures concerning philosophy at the Sorbonne and reading poetry with Alain-Fournier. He also studied the poetry of Dante of English writers John Webster and John Donne in connection to French symbolist by Jules Lafarge which contributed much to his style. He returned to Harvard for three years (1911-1914) to study Sanskrit and read Indian philosophy. 1913-1916 he managed to read Bradley's Appearance and Reality and a dissertation known as "Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley." By then, World War I had already interceded, so he never went back to Harvard to collect the final oral examination for the Ph.D. degree. At this juncture, he met with the American poet identified as Ezra Pound and started having adjacent relations with him.

Elliot emerged as the most intellectual poet in the English language during his era. His undergraduate poems were written and conventional. Among his early published work and modernism in the English language was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915). Eliot's volume for a start named as Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917 the maturity of 20th Century in poetic revolution can attainably be dated. The importance of the whirling is still debated upon, but the distinctive similarity to the Romantic revolution of Coleridge and Wordsworth is definite. Eliot and Pound thought of reforming poetic diction just like their counterparts in the 18th Century. However, Wordsworth was set to going back to the real language of men, but Eliot tirelessly generated new versification basing them on contemporary speech.

Before he started his brief career in 1917 as a bank clerk in Lloyds' Bank Ltd., he used to teach French and Latin at High gate School for one year. In the meantime, he was also an inventive reviewer as well as an essayist in both literacy critic and technical philosophy. In 1919 he published poems that involved the poetry of "Gerontion," which was associated with a meditative interior monologue in blank verses of which nothing had appeared in English of this poem.

1922 publication of his poem "The Waste Land" made him a winner in the international reputation where the poem portrayed with might power the disenchantment, disillusionment and disgust of the era just after the World War I. Eliot had presented himself as a master of his poetic phrase in his earlier poems. The Waste Land poem projected him as besides, a metrist of might virtues and capable of surprising modulations starting from the extreme to the dialogue. In this publication, Eliot has five distinct areas where he emphasizes on the "rhetorical discontinuity" that projected the 20th Century sensibility of the famous modern cities of the west. Eliot presents the hopelessness and a state of confusion of purpose of life in the secularized city, the decay of the eternal city which is described as the central theme of The Waste Land, embodied by the poems abiding rhetorical shifts and its juxtapositions of disparity styles.

Eliot emphasized on the usage of poet-critic in a "programmatic criticism" implying that criticism should express the poet's interest as a poet, unlike historical scholarship that commences at positioning the poet in his background. With intentions or not, Eliot's criticism established an atmosphere in which his poetry could be understood better and appreciated that if it had to appear in a literary critic.

"Traditional and individual talent, "appearing in Eliot's first critical volume, The Sacred Wood (1920). Eliot affirms that tradition as applied by the poet is not a bare repetition of the work of the immediate past instead it consists of the whole of European literature from home run to present. Thus, a poet writing in English may create his/her tradition by the use of materials originated from any past in any language. This view is "programmatic" such that it persuades the reader to absorb and agree that the complete innovation of Eliot's multilingualism quotations and serious satire of other poets' styles in The Waste Land.

Eliot's perceive that even secular drama do draw people who unknowingly do seek a religion that influenced him to bring about show above all other forms of poetry. All Eliot's plays are in blank verses of his invention, where the metric impact is not understood apart from the sense; thus bringing the poetic drama back to the famous stage.

Inclusive of the chorus in the traditional Greek behave to make understandable to common humanity the meaning of the heroic act in the modern miracle play on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. In 1939 the family reunion was less popular. Eliot went back to the writing of plays with the cocktail party in 1949, which is after World War II. In these plays, Eliot agreed to absorb the current theatrical conventions.

Eliot's profession as an editor was mainly supporting his main interests, but in his quarterly review, The Criterion (1922-1939) was the most differentiated international critical journal of the period. He worked as an editor of the publishing firm of Faber & Faber Ltd. starting from the early 1920s till his death. He is widely known as a lavish and favoritism patron of young poets.

Eliot maintained his private life in the background. He got married to Vivien Haigh Wood in 1915 and unfortunately in 1933 she was mentally ill thus lived apart. She later died in 1947. In 1957 January he remarried to Valerie Fletcher who then spent life with happily married till his death and who became his literary executor. She was considered responsible when she released a variety of editions of Eliot's work and letters. She also approved Andrew Lloyd Webber's modification of Eliot's light verse acquired from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) into the musical Cats (1981).

Beginning of the 1920s through to present, Eliot's impact as a poet and as a distinguished critic in both Great Britain and the US has been substantial not only in the establishment of the study of English Literature but also as an independent academic discipline.

Conclusion

In conclusion, throughout his lifetime, his creative artworks was much inclined on sympathetic clarifications since his demise interpreters have been outwardly viewed as more critical while dealing with his complicated relationship to his American native. However, Eliot was never compared by any other poet in the 20th Century in the way he ordered for the attentiveness of his audience.

Works Cited

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. Collected Poems 1909-1962. Faber & Faber, 2009.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. Complete poems and plays. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1952.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. "Tradition and the individual talent." Perspecta 19 (1982): 36-42.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. Four quartets. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1943.