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Taking Theosophical ideas

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A Brief Biography of T S Eliot

 

Thomas Stearns Eliot

(1888-1965)

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Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He is known to have studied Theosophy, Buddhism. Hinduism and Sanskrit and knew several members of the Theosophical Society but never actually joined. He settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director. He founded and, during the seventeen years of its publication (1922-1939), edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church.

 

Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. Never compromising either with the public or indeed with language itself, he has followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite this difficulty his influence on modern poetic diction has been immense.

 

Eliot's poetry from Prufrock (1917) to the Four Quartets (1943) reflects the development of a Christian writer: the early work, especially The Waste Land (1922), is essentially negative, the expression of that horror from which the search for a higher world arises. Despite his conversion to High Anglicanism, Theosophical and Hindu influences can be found in his work.

 

In 1925 Eliot published The Hollow Men. Eliot reworks deleted fragments from the first draft of The Waste Land into a poetic sequence that meditates on the barrenness of modern civilisation and the search for values to redeem it.

 

In Ash Wednesday (1930) and the Four Quartets this higher world becomes more visible; nonetheless Eliot has always taken care not to become a «religious poet». and often belittled the power of poetry as a religious force. However, his dramas Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939) are more openly Christian apologies. In his essays, especially the later ones, Eliot advocates a traditionalism in religion, society, and literature that seems at odds with his pioneer activity as a poet. But although the Eliot of Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) is an older man than the poet of The Waste Land, it should not be forgotten that for Eliot tradition is a living organism comprising past and present in constant mutual interaction. Eliot's plays Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959) were published in one volume in 1962; Collected Poems 1909-62 appeared in 1963.

 

T S Eliot Chronology 1888 - 1922

 

Quotes By T S Eliot

 

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

 

In my beginning is my end.

 

I don't believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.

 

Moving between the legs of tables and of chairs, rising or falling, grasping at kisses and toys, advancing boldly, sudden to take alarm, retreating to the corner of arm and knee, eager to be reassured, taking pleasure in the fragrant

brilliance of the Christmas tree.

 

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

 

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked

to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

 

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

 

 

 

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