TS Elliot
Thomas Stearns Elliot, an American poet and dramatist, was born in St Louis, on September 26, 1888 and died on January 4, 1965. Elliot was born into an upper class Missouri family. Though he spent his childhood in Missouri, his work contains very few signs of St. Louis. After studying at Harvard University, Elliot moved to Europe, where he did the majority of his writing and enjoyed most of his literary success. He married Vivien Haigh-Wood in July 1915 and from 1915 through 1919 held a number of jobs including teacher, bank clerk, and assistant editor of the literary magazine Egoist. From 1921 through 1922 he was the London correspondent for The Dial and in 1922 founded The Criterion and served as its editor until 1939. In 1947 his wife died after a long illness, and Elliot did not remarry until 1957 when he wed Valerie Fletcher. During the interim, Elliot continued to enjoy tremendous literary success. In 1948 King George VI bestowed the Order of Merit on him and that was the same year Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His final work, The Elder Statesmen published in 1958 was the last thing he wrote before dying seven years later in 1965. Elliot moved to Great Britain after a tri
Another of Elliot's religious pieces is Four Quartets which is widely regarded as the greatest philosophical poem of the twentieth century. Though written after his conversion to Anglicanism, the basis of the poem is Eastern with the Bhagavad-Gita as the primary source of motivation. Elliot considered it to be his masterpiece, and it draw upon his vast knowledge of mysticism and philosophy, which some critics denounce as obscure fields to be constantly referencing, thereby creating a difficulty in understanding for the average reader. However, for the more educated reader, the poem is an in depth examination of the relationship between life in time and life in eternity, freedom, and happiness. The depth of religious reference in Four Quartets gives a clear indication that it’s subject matter is being viewed from a religious view point. The themes of death and of questioning whether life can have any definable meaning, as discussed in Eliot’s earlier poetry re-emerge here, but they are viewed in the light of Eliot’s conversion to the Anglican faith, therefore their treatments are discernibly different. In his essay “Religion and Literature,“ Eliot argues that it is necessary for a religious reader to “scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological standards (Elliot 149).” Therefore it is not surprising that it is possible to find in Four Quartets started in 1935 the same year Eliot’s essay was written, an ethical and theological standard. It is also interesting to notice that all Eliot's poems which have no narrative pattern and are obscure. He is at his best when he starts telling a story, or describing its consequences. Usually, the story itself is only half present. It must be guessed from
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Approximate Word count = 1198
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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