T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was an Anglo-American poet, dramatist, and literary critic, whose works like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land and Four Quartets, are considered major achievements of twentieth-century Modernism.

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Family and early life

Eliot was born into a prominent family from St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919), was a successful businessman, becoming president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis. His mother, n?e Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843-1929), taught school prior to marriage and wrote poetry. Thomas was their last child; his parents were 44 years old when he was born. Thomas' four surviving sisters were about eleven to nineteen years older than he; his brother, eight years older.

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William Greenleaf Eliot, Eliot's grandfather, was a Unitarian minister who moved to St. Louis when it was still on the frontier and who was instrumental in founding many of the city's institutions including Washington University in St. Louis. One distant cousin was Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, and a fifth cousin, another Tom Eliot, was Chancellor of Washington University.

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Eliot's works allude to St. Louis (there was, in his youth, a Prufrock furniture store in town) and to New England. (His family had Massachusetts ties and summered at a large cottage they had built in Gloucester. The cottage, close to the shore at Eastern Point, had a view of the sea and the young Eliot would often go sailing.)

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Education

From 1898 to 1905, Eliot was a day student at St. Louis's Smith Academy, a preparatory school for Washington University. At the academy, Eliot studied Latin, Greek, French and German. Although, upon graduation, he could have gone to Harvard University, his parents sent him, for a preparatory year, to Milton Academy, in Milton, Massachusetts, near Boston. There, he met Scofield Thayer, who would later publish his poem, The Waste Land. He studied at Harvard from 1906 to 1909, where he earned his A.B.. The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems, and he became life-long friends with Conrad Aiken. The following year, he earned an A.M at Harvard. In the 1910–1911 school year, Eliot lived in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and touring the continent. Returning to Harvard in 1911 as a doctoral student in philosophy, Eliot studied the writings of F.H. Bradley, Buddhism, and Indic philology, (learning Sanskrit and Pali to read some of the religious texts). He was awarded a scholarship to attend Merton College, Oxford in 1914, and before settling there, he visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer program in philosophy, but when World War I started, he went to London and then to Oxford. Eliot was not happy at Merton and declined a second year of attendance. Instead, in the summer of 1915, he married, and, after a short visit to the U.S. to meet with his family (not taking his wife), he took a few teaching jobs. He continued to work on his dissertation and, in the spring of 1916, sent it to Harvard, which accepted it. Because he did not appear in person to defend the thesis, however, he was not awarded his Ph.D. (In 1964, the dissertation was published as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.) During Eliot's university career, he studied with George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, Henri Bergson, C.R. Lanman, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim.

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Life in Britain

In a letter to Conrad Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot complained that he was still a virgin, adding "I am very dependent upon women. I mean female society." Less than four months later he was introduced to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess, by mutual friends in Oxford. On 26 June 1915, Eliot and Vivien (the name she preferred), both 27 years old, were married in a register office. Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds were staying with Russell in his flat. Some critics have suggested that Vivien and Russell had an affair (see Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow), but these allegations have never been confirmed.

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In the 1960s, Eliot would write: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her the marriage brought no happiness", adding "o me it brought the state of mind out of which came 'The Waste Land'."

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In 1927 Eliot took British citizenship and converted to Anglicanism (on June 29).

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Eliot separated from his wife in 1933. Eliot's second marriage was happy though short. On January 10, 1957 he married Esm? Valerie Fletcher. Unlike his hasty marriage to his first wife, Eliot knew Valerie well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August, 1949. But, as with his marriage to Vivienne, the wedding was, to preserve his privacy, kept a secret, held in a church at 6:15 A.M. and with not many more other than his wife's parents attending. Valerie was 38 years younger than her husband and the years of her widowhood have been spent preserving his legacy; she has edited and annotated The Letters of T.S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land.

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Eliot died of emphysema in London on January 4, 1965. For many years he had health problems due to his heavy smoking, often being laid low with bronchitis or tachycardia. After his death, his body was cremated and, according to Eliot's wishes, the ashes taken to St Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from which Eliot's ancestors emigrated to America. There, a simple plaque commemorates him. On the second anniversary of his death a large stone placed on the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey was dedicated to Eliot. This commemoration contains his name, an indication that he had received the Order of Merit, dates, and a quote from Little Gidding: "the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living."

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Late in his life, Eliot exchanged numerous letters with comedian Groucho Marx. A portrait of the comedian, which Eliot requested of Marx, was proudly displayed in Eliot's home next to pictures of Yeats and Valery.

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OM: The word Om and similar words have these meanings:-...

September 26: September 26 is the 269th day of the year (270th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 96 days remaining....

1888: 1888 is a leap year starting on Sunday (click on link for calendar). In Germany, 1888 is known as the 1888 Year of Three Emperors....

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