AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF T.S. ELIOT

TS Eliot

TS Eliot (1934)

Thomas Stearns Eliot (born September 26, 1888 in St. Louis , Missouri , United States , † January 4, 1965 in London , England ) was an English poet , playwright and critic who is considered one of the most important representatives of literary modernism . In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature .

Eliot studied philosophy and literature at Harvard . After one academic year at the Sorbonne and a stay in 1914 at the University of Marburg Eliot emigrated to London at the beginning of the First World War and lived predominantly there. He worked first as a teacher, then from 1917 to 1925 in the Foreign Department of Lloyds Bank until joining the publishing house Faber and Faber , in whose direction he worked for decades. ^[1] In the 1920s he spent much time in Paris . In 1927 he became a British citizen and joined the Church of England.^[2]

Eliot celebrated his first literary successes in 1915 with J. Alfred Prufrocks Liebesgesang (The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) ; but the international breakthrough only succeeded him in 1922 with Das wüste Land , one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century. ^[3]It was often with James Joyce 'century novel Ulysses compared, which appeared in the same year by the same publisher for the first time. This was followed by The Hollow Men , Ash Wednesday and the Four Quartets , which represent his late work and contributed to the fact that in 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. ^[4]

Eliot was also active as a playwright and published seven dramas , of which murder in the cathedral is the most internationally famous work today. When The Cocktail Party was performed on Broadway in 1950 , Eliot received the Tony Award for Best Play as the author of the play .

Eliot writes that his brittle, lyrical poetry is rich in allusions to the myth, culture, and poetry of the millennium. ^[5] She is mirroring an out-of-touch world and trying to solve the existential problem of modern man by turning to a Christian-based humanism . His stage works are the revival of the poetic drama.

Table of Contents

·         1life

·         2meaning

·         3Political and religious views

·         4Eliot as a playwright

·         5works

o    5.1Lyrics

o    5.2dramas

o    5.3Criticism

·         6literature

·         7web links

·         8individual proofs

Life 

Eliot was born in St. Louis, the son of a respected Boston family whose ancestors had emigrated from England to America in the 17th century. ^[6] He studied at Harvard and later at the Sorbonne in Paris mathematics, philosophy and European and Asian languages. In 1911 he returned to Harvard University as a doctoral student before he finally went to Europe in 1914. His first stop there was Marburg , where he attended a vacation course at the University. When the First World War began, he first moved to London and finally to Oxford . At this time he published in the edited by Ezra PoundCatholic Anthology his first significant poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock . ^In the wake of America, he returned in the episode only as a visitor back.

Eliot and Virginia Woolf . Photo of Ottoline Morrell , 1924

In England, he first worked as a bank employee, but then became director of a prestigious publishing house. In 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh Wood. On a trip to Paris in 1920, he met for the first time James Joyce , with whom he later connected a friendship. In 1922 he founded the literary journal The Criterion , whose publisher he remained until her retirement in 1939. In the same year, his first major work, the Versepos The Desert Land (English original title The Waste Land) , and was awarded the Dial Prize for special services to American literature. Eliot became famous in one fell swoop.

In 1927 Eliot acquired British citizenship and joined the Church of England . His appearance at this time was emphatically British, which went so far that he gained an English accent. He rejected many aspects of the American tradition. Nevertheless, he initially traveled back to the United States to take in 1932 and 1933 a visiting professorship in poetics at Harvard. ^[8th]

1935 was the publication of the drama Murder in the Cathedral . Over the next two decades, several essays were published , in 1944 also the important lyric Four Quartets . In 1952, TS Eliot became president of the London Library. In 1943 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters , in 1954 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1960 to the American Philosophical Society . Over the years he has received numerous honorary doctorates , including from the Sorbonne , Yale University, Oxford and Munich. Until shortly before his death, he published other essays and dramas, including The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman .

TS Eliot died on 4 January 1965 at the age of 76 in London. His widow Valerie Eliot - the couple had married in 1957 - managed the estate until their death in November 2012. ^[9]

Meaning 

The focus in Eliot's work was on the lyric. He is considered an outstanding poet of his time, who saw his role models in Virgil , Dante and William Shakespeare . He also gave the metaphysical poetry a high priority. In a 1921 published script he emphasized especially the English poet John Donne , sparking an international discussion of metaphysical poets. He also wrote influential critical essays on the poetry of romance . Eliot's themes were time and eternity, the struggle for the rebirth of the mind, reconciliation with the ghosts of the past. His drama was above all throughWilliam Butler inspired Yeats . He also popularized free rhythms and abstract poetry, partly with musical compositional elements, in Europe.

Eliot regarded literature as a way to uncover an order in the chaotic reality and thus to directly influence the individual life. His way of thinking was influenced by Buddhism , Christian mysticism and ancient philosophy . He took the view that one can only understand the present if one intensively deals with the past. ^[10] He had a strong influence on some significant future currents of thought, including the existentialism .

Political and Religious Views 

TS Eliot's world view was mainly due to the Christian faith as described in the High Church towards the Anglican Church ( Church of England ) is expressed and by thinkers like Augustine coined. He largely rejected a societal orientation on worldly values ​​and called for culture to be oriented towards religion, as it could not function in any other way. He regarded liberalism , humanism or Marxism as failed. Political orientations that were not based on faith would inevitably lead to totalitarianism or anarchyto lead. Faith is not arbitrary, but must include acceptance of dogmas and the church. A society that does not follow these principles runs the risk of dissolving for Eliot. ^[11]

Great mistrust brought Eliot to the idea of ​​progress, which played a major role in the age of modernity. This is partly because he rejected a strict division of time into past, present, and future, and had transcendental notions of time. The past and the future are always included in the present for him. Time is not conceivable for him without reference to eternity, history not without a reference to God. For him, worldly progress is based on the wrong values, it is always oriented towards the future, which, however, makes no sense in Eliot's thought model and on the contrary can lead people blind to more important values. ^[12]

One of the reproaches TS Eliot has repeatedly faced is that of anti-Semitism . Especially a passage in his poem Gerontion and a lecture series, which he held in Virginia in 1933, were perceived as explicitly anti-Semitic. Although Eliot implicitly at least partially distanced himself from such views after the Second World War , anti-Semitic principles of his thinking still play a role in the current Eliot research. ^[13]

Eliot as playwright 

The drama turned TS Eliot relatively late, in the 1930s. He was heavily influenced by William Butler Yeats. Eliot was a follower of verse drama in which he saw the merits of literary and musical works combined. He criticized playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen or Anton Chekhov for their use of prose , which in his eyes restricted their means of expression. On the other hand, he considered verses to be clearly superior, since they had a deeper and less articulated basis and thus had a stronger effect. ^[14]

A problem of verse drama was for Eliot his alienation from the life of his time. He considered the usual blank verse unfit to reflect the reality of life, since the everyday language had moved too far away from him. He therefore criticized a large part of the dramas written in the 19th and early 20th centuries in Blankvers for their artificiality. For Eliot an approach to the everyday language was necessary to be able to reach the theater audience emotionally again. ^[15] The chosen him verse forms are relatively free, therefore, typically verses with three different accents and syllabic numbers he managed flexibly.

Like the language, the characters and scenes of his dramas are contemporary and often commonplace. Often, however, it is based on religious or mythological elements, some of which are obvious and sometimes more hidden. For Eliot, the focus was not so much on the modernization of myths, but rather on the intention of making the general human, expressed in these myths, accessible to the modern public. ^[16]

An important German translator of some of Eliot's works was Rudolf Alexander Schröder (1878-1962).

Works 

Poetry 

·         Prufrock and other observations . 1917

·         Ara Vos Prec (1919)

·         The Waste Land (dt. The Waste Land ). 1922

·         The Hollow Men (dt. The hollow men ), 1925

·         Ash Wednesday ( Ash Wednesday ). 1930

·         Marina . 1930

·         Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (dt. Old Possum's Book Cats ). 1939 (set to music as musical cats in 1981 )

·         East Coker . 1940

·         Burnt Norton . 1941

·         The Dry Salvages . 1941

·         Little Gidding . 1942

·         Four Quartets (dt. Four Quartets ). 1943

Dramas 

·         Sweeney Agonistes . 1932

·         The Rock . 1934

·         Murder in the Cathedral (German Murder in the cathedral ). 1935

·         The Family Reunion (dt. A Family Day ). 1939

·         The Cocktail Party (dt. The Cocktail Party ). 1950

·         The Confidential Clerk (dt. The private secretary ). 1954

·         The Elder Statesman (dt. A deserved statesman ). 1959

Criticism 

·         The Sacred Wood . 1920

·         The Criterion ; Journal, publisher from 1922 to 1939

·         Andrew Marvell . 1922

·         Homage to John Dryden . 1924

·         Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca . 1927

·         For Lancelot Andrews: Essays on Style and Order . 1928

·         Dante . 1929

·         Tradition and Experiment in Present-Day Literature . 1929

·         Thoughts After Lambeth . 1931

·         John Dryden . 1932

·         The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism . 1933

·         After Strange Gods . 1934

·         Elizabethan essays . 1934

·         Essays Ancient and Modern . 1936

·         The Idea of ​​a Christian Society . 1939

·         Britain at War . 1941

·         Points of View . 1941

·         The Classics and The Man of Letters . 1942

·         Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (dt. Contributions to the concept of culture ). 1949

·         Poetry and drama . 1951

·         The Three Voices of Poetry . 1954

·         Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern . 1954

·         On Poetry and Poets (dt. Poets and poetry ). 1957

·         Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of FH Bradley . 1964 (first printing of the dissertation of 1916)

·         The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry . Year of origin unknown, first published in 1994

Literature 

·         Kenneth Asher: TS Eliot and Ideology . Cambridge 1995, ISBN 0-521-45284-8 .

·         Ronald Bush: TS Eliot . Oxford 1983, ISBN 0-19-503376-0 .

·         Joseph Chiari: TS Eliot - Poet and Dramatist . New York 1979, ISBN 0-87752-218-9 .

·         George AG: TS Eliot - His Mind and Art . Bombay 1962.

·         Valerie Eliot (ed.): The Letters of TS Eliot . Vol. I, 1898-1922. San Diego [etc.] 1988.

·         Anthony Hands: Sources for the Poetry of TS Eliot . Oxford 1993, ISBN 0-86054-761-2 .

·         Anthony Julius: TS Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form . Cambridge 1995.

·         William Skaff: The Philosophy of TS Eliot . Philadelphia 1986, ISBN 0-8122-8017-2 .

·         Jürgen Klein (ed.): TS Eliot, poeta doctus, tradition and the constitution of classical modernism . With a contribution by Wolfgang Iser . Peter Lang Publishing, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Berne / Brussels / Oxford / Vienna 2003, ISBN 978-3-631-39819-7 .

·         FO Matthiessen : The Achievement of TS Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York 1935, online [1] .

·         James E. Miller Jr. TS Eliot. The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922 . The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.

·         Hartmut Sommer: The Gateway to the Rose Garden - TS Eliot and his adoptive country England. In: Revolt and forest aisle. The poet philosophers of the 20th century . Lambert Schneider, Darmstadt 2011, ISBN 978-3-650-22170-4 .

·         Gregor Brand :  Eliot, Thomas Stearns. In: Biographical Bibliographic Church Lexicon (BBKL). Volume 30, Bautz, Nordhausen 2009, ISBN 978-3-88309-478-6 , Sp. 324-358.

·         Robert Crawford: Young Eliot: from St. Louis to The Waste Land . Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-374-27944-8 .

·         John Worthen: TS Eliot: a short biography . House Publishing, London 2011, ISBN 978-1-906598-86-0 .