T.S. Eliot, born Thomas Stearns Eliot on
September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, was a towering figure in
20th-century literature. He was a poet, essayist, playwright, and literary
critic whose works helped define the Modernist movement in English literature.
Although American by birth, Eliot became a British citizen in 1927 and spent
most of his literary career in England. His writing reflects a deep engagement
with the spiritual, cultural, and social anxieties of his time.
Beyond poetry, Eliot was a major literary
critic. His essays such as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” argued that
good poetry must be rooted in historical consciousness. He believed poets
should be aware of their literary heritage while still creating something new.
This balance of innovation and tradition is at the heart of Eliot’s own work.
Eliot’s later poetry took a more spiritual
tone, especially after his conversion to Anglicanism. Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four
Quartets (1943) reflect his deepening religious faith and philosophical
meditations on time, suffering, and redemption. Four Quartets, considered by many to be his masterpiece,
combines poetic lyricism with Christian mysticism and philosophical reflection.
It illustrates Eliot’s belief in the possibility of spiritual renewal in a
fractured world.
Throughout his life, Eliot won numerous accolades,
including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. The Nobel committee praised
him for his "outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day
poetry." His influence can be seen in generations of writers, and his
works remain central to literary study.
T.S.
Eliot died on January 4, 1965, in London, but his legacy lives on. Through his
complex, challenging, and visionary writing, Eliot reshaped the literary
landscape of the 20th century and left a lasting mark on poetry, criticism, and
modern thought.
En l'an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j'ay beues…
Pipit sate upright in her chair
Some distance from where I was sitting;
Views of the Oxford Colleges
Lay on the table, with the knitting.
Daguerreotypes and silhouettes,
Her grandfather and great great aunts,
Supported on the mantelpiece
An Invitation to the Dance.. . . . . .
I shall not want Honour in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney
And have talk with Coriolanus
And other heroes of that kidney.
I shall not want Capital in Heaven
For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond:
We two shall lie together, lapt
In a five per cent Exchequer Bond.
I shall not want Society in Heaven,
Lucretia Borgia shall be my Bride;
Her anecdotes will be more amusing
Than Pipit's experience could provide.
I shall not want Pipit in Heaven:
Madame Blavatsky will instruct me
In the Seven Sacred Trances;
Piccarda de Donati will conduct me…
But where is the penny world I bought
To eat with Pipit behind the screen?
The red-eyed scavengers are creeping
From Kentish Town and Golder's Green;
Where are the eagles and the trumpets?
Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps.
Over buttered scones and crumpets
Weeping, weeping multitudes
Droop in a hundred A.B.C.'s*
A Song For Simeon
Lord, they Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winder sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.
Grant us they peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children's
children?
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat's path, and the fox's home,
Fleeing from foreign faces and the foreign swords.
Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel's consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.
According to thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints' stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let they servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.
Aunt Helen
Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,
And lived in a small house near a fashionable square
Cared for by servants to the number of four.
Now when she died there was silence in heaven
And silence at her end of the street.
The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet—
He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.
The dogs were handsomely provided for,
But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.
The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,
And the footman sat upon the dining-table
Holding the second housemaid on his knees—
Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.
Cousin Nancy
Miss Nancy Ellicott Strode across the hills and broke them,
Rode across the hills and broke them—
The barren New England hills—
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.
Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.
Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.
Gerontion
Thou hast nor youth nor age
But as it were an after dinner sleep
Dreaming of both.
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man,
A dull head among windy spaces.
Signs are taken for wonders. "We would see a sign!"
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering Judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,
An old man in a draughty house
Under a windy knob.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last
We have not reached conclusion, when I
Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last
I have not made this show purposelessly
And it is not by any concitation
Of the backward devils.
I would meet you upon this honestly.
I that was near your heart was removed therefrom
To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.
I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use it for your closer contact?
These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled
Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear
In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits
Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn,
White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,
And an old man driven by the Trades
To a sleepy corner.
Tenants of the house,
Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.
Honeymoon
They have seen the Netherlands, they are returning to Terre Haute;
But one summer night, here they are in Ravenna,
On your back spreading your knees
Of four limp legs all swollen with bites.
We raise the sheet to better scratch.
Less than a league from here is Saint Apollinaire
In Classe, a basilica known to amateurs
Of acanthus capitals swirled by the wind.
They'll take the eight o'clock train
Prolong their miseries from Padua to Milan
Where are the Last Supper, and a cheap restaurant.
He thinks about tips, and writes his balance sheet.
They will have seen Switzerland and crossed France.
And Saint Apollinaire, stiff and ascetic,
God's old abandoned factory, still stands
In its crumbling stones the precise form of Byzantium.
Mr. Apollinax
When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States
His laughter tinkled among the teacups.
I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch-trees,
And of Priapus in the shrubbery
Gaping at the lady in the swing.
In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor Channing-Cheetah's
He laughed like an irresponsible foetus.
His laughter was submarine and profound
Like the old man of the sea's
Hidden under coral islands
Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence,
Dropping from fingers of surf.
I looked for the head of Mr. Apollinax rolling under a chair
Or grinning over a screen
With seaweed in its hair.
I heard the beat of centaur's hoofs over the hard turf
As his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon.
"He is a charming man"—"But after all what did he mean?"—
"His pointed ears… He must be unbalanced,"—
"There was something he said that I might have challenged."
Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah
I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon.
Spleen
Sunday: this satisfied procession
Of definite Sunday faces;
Bonnets, silk hats, and conscious graces
In repetition that displaces
Your mental self-possession
By this unwarranted digression.
Evening, lights, and tea!
Children and cats in the alley;
Dejection unable to rally
Against this dull conspiracy.
And Life, a little bald and gray,
Languid, fastidious, and bland,
Waits, hat and gloves in hand,
Punctilious of tie and suit
(Somewhat impatient of delay)
On the doorstep of the Absolute.
Sweeney Erect
And the trees about me,
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks
Groan with continual surges; and behind me
Make all a desolation. Look, look, wenches!
Paint me a cavernous waste shore
Cast in the unstilted Cyclades,
Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks
Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.
Display me Aeolus above
Reviewing the insurgent gales
Which tangle Ariadne's hair
And swell with haste the perjured sails.
Morning stirs the feet and hands
(Nausicaa and Polypheme),
Gesture of orang-outang
Rises from the sheets in steam.
This withered root of knots of hair
Slitted below and gashed with eyes,
This oval O cropped out with teeth:
The sickle motion from the thighs
Jackknifes upward at the knees
Then straightens out from heel to hip
Pushing the framework of the bed
And clawing at the pillow slip.
Sweeney addressed full length to shave
Broadbottomed, pink from nape to base,
Knows the female temperament
And wipes the suds around his face.
(The lengthened shadow of a man
Is history, said Emerson
Who had not seen the silhouette
Of Sweeney straddled in the sun).
Tests the razor on his leg
Waiting until the shriek subsides.
The epileptic on the bed
Curves backward, clutching at her sides.
The ladies of the corridor
Find themselves involved, disgraced,
Call witness to their principles
And deprecate the lack of taste
Observing that hysteria
Might easily be misunderstood;
Mrs. Turner intimates
It does the house no sort of good.
But Doris, towelled from the bath,
Enters padding on broad feet,
Bringing sal volatile
And a glass of brandy neat.
The director
Woe to the unfortunate Thames!
Tamisel Which flows so close to the Spectator.
The director
Conservative
From the Spectator
Stinks of the breeze.
Shareholders
Reactionaries
From the Spectator
Conservative
arm in arm
do tricks
Discreetly.
In a sewer
A little girl
in rags
Camard
Looked
The director
From the Spectator
Conservative
And die of love.
Morning At The Window
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
T.S. Eliot – Full Biography
Full Name: Thomas Stearns Eliot
Born: September 26, 1888 – St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Died: January 4, 1965 – London, England
Nationality: American (by birth), British (from 1927)
Occupation: Poet, Essayist, Playwright, Literary Critic
Major Works: The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock, Four Quartets, Murder in the Cathedral
Early
Life and Education
T.S. Eliot was born into a prominent
and well-educated family in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware Eliot,
was a successful businessman, and his mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, was a
poet and social worker. As a child, Eliot suffered from congenital double
inguinal hernia, which made him physically weak and isolated him from many
physical activities. This early isolation led to his intense interest in
literature and writing.
He attended Smith Academy in St.
Louis and then went to Harvard University, where he studied philosophy,
literature, and Sanskrit. During his years at Harvard, Eliot was influenced by
the works of Dante, Shakespeare, and French Symbolist poets such as Baudelaire
and Laforgue.
Move
to Europe and Literary Development
In 1914, Eliot moved to Europe on a
scholarship, initially studying at the Sorbonne in Paris and later at Oxford
University. He soon decided to stay in England permanently, where he worked as
a teacher, editor, and later in a bank. In 1915, he married Vivienne
Haigh-Wood, though their marriage was troubled and eventually led to
separation.
Eliot’s poetic reputation began with
the publication of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1915, a poem
that showcased his modernist style—fragmented, ironic, and psychologically
complex.
The
Waste Land and Literary Fame
His fame skyrocketed with the
publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The poem, edited with the help of
Ezra Pound, is considered one of the most important poems of the 20th century.
It captured the despair, disillusionment, and fragmentation of the post-World
War I era. Using multiple voices, languages, and literary allusions, the poem
broke from traditional poetic forms.
That same year, Eliot also founded
the influential literary journal The Criterion, which he edited until
1939. He became an authoritative literary critic, with major essays like Tradition
and the Individual Talent shaping modern literary thought.
Conversion,
Later Works, and Spiritual Themes
In 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism
and became a British citizen, marking a major shift in his life and work. His
later poetry, such as Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets
(1943), reflects deep religious and philosophical concerns. Four Quartets,
in particular, is a profound meditation on time, suffering, and spiritual
renewal, considered by many to be his finest work.
Dramatic
Works and Literary Criticism
Eliot also made major contributions
to drama, writing verse plays like Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The
Family Reunion (1939), and The Cocktail Party (1949). His plays
combined poetic language with religious and philosophical themes.
He wrote extensively as a critic,
producing essays on Elizabethan drama, metaphysical poets, and literary tradition.
His influence as a critic was almost as significant as his poetry.
Awards
and Legacy
In 1948, T.S. Eliot was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature for his outstanding contribution to modern poetry. He
also received the Order of Merit, one of the UK’s highest honors.
Eliot’s legacy is immense. He helped
redefine the scope and language of poetry in the modern era. His work remains
central in literary studies, and his influence stretches from poetry and
criticism to drama and even popular culture.
Personal
Life and Death
After separating from his first
wife, Vivienne (who later died in a mental institution), Eliot remained a
bachelor until he married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, in 1957. Their
marriage brought him happiness in his final years.
T.S. Eliot died on January 4, 1965,
in London. His ashes are interred in East Coker, Somerset—the village of his
ancestors, and the title of one of his Four Quartets.
Famous
Quotes by Eliot
- “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a
whimper.” (The Hollow Men)
- “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly
find out how far one can go.”
- “April is the cruellest month…” (The Waste Land)
T.S. Eliot’s work continues to
challenge, inspire, and provoke readers around the world. He remains one of the
greatest and most influential poets of the modern age.
