Thomas Stearns Eliot
( 1888, St. Louis, Missouri - 1965,
London, Eng.)

American-English poet, playwright, literary
critic, and editor, a leader of the modernist
movement in poetry in such works as The
Waste Land (1922) and The Four Quartets
(1943).

One of the most distinguished literary figures of
the 20th cent., He studied at Harvard, the
Sorbonne, and Oxford. In 1914 he established
residence in London and in 1927 became a
British subject. After working as a teacher and
a bank clerk he began a publishing career; he
was assistant editor of the Egoist (1917–19)
and edited his own quarterly, the Criterion
(1922–39).

Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American
culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His
experiments in diction, style, and versification
revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical
essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new
ones. The publication of The Four Quartets led to his
recognition as the greatest living English poet and man
of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded both the Order
of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The men who influenced him at Harvard were
George Santayana, the philosopher and poet,
and the critic Irving Babbitt. From Babbitt he
derived an anti-Romantic attitude that,
amplified by his later reading of British
philosophers F.H. Bradley and T.E. Hulme,
lasted through his life. In the academic year
1909-10 he was an assistant in philosophy at
Harvard.

He spent the year 1910-11 in France, attending Henri
Bergson's lectures in philosophy at the Sorbonne and
reading poetry with Alain-Fournier. Eliot's study of the
poetry of Dante, of the English writers John Webster
and John Donne, and of the French Symbolist Jules
Laforgue helped him to find his own style. From 1911
to 1914 he was back at Harvard reading Indian
philosophy and studying Sanskrit. In 1914 Eliot met
and began a close association with the American poet
Ezra Pound.

Eliot was to pursue four careers: editor, dramatist,
literary critic, and philosophical poet. He was probably
the most erudite poet of his time in the English
language. His undergraduate poems were "literary"
and conventional. His first important publication, and
the first masterpiece of "modernism" in English, was
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against
the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table. . . .


Eliot’s early poetical works—Prufrock and Other
Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste
Land (1922)—express the anguish and barrenness of
modern life and the isolation of the individual,
particularly as reflected in the failure of love. The
Waste Land, whose published version reflects
extraordinary editing by Eliot’s friend Ezra Pound,
compelled immediate critical attention. His complex
early poems, employing myths, religious symbolism,
and literary allusion, signified a break with 19th-century
poetic traditions.

It represented a break with the immediate past as
radical as that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William
Wordsworth in Lyrical Ballads (1798). From the
appearance of Eliot's first volume, Prufrock and Other
Observations, in 1917, one may conveniently date the
maturity of the 20th-century poetic revolution. The
significance of the revolution is still disputed, but the
striking similarity to the Romantic revolution of
Coleridge and Wordsworth is obvious: Eliot and Pound,
like their 18th-century counterparts, set about
reforming poetic diction.


Whereas Wordsworth thought he was going back to the "real
language of men," Eliot struggled to create new verse rhythms
based on the rhythms of contemporary speech. He sought a
poetic diction that might be spoken by an educated person, being
"neither pedantic nor vulgar."
For a year Eliot taught French and Latin at the Highgate School; in
1917 he began his brief career as a bank clerk in Lloyds Bank Ltd.
Meanwhile he was also a prolific reviewer and essayist in both
literary criticism and technical philosophy. In 1919 he published
Poems, which contained the poem "Gerontion," a meditative
interior monologue in blank verse: nothing like this poem had
appeared in English.
The Waste Land and criticism.


With the publication in 1922 of his poem The Waste
Land, Eliot won an international reputation. The Waste
Land expresses with great power the disenchantment,
disillusionment, and disgust of the period after World
War I. In a series of vignettes, loosely linked by the
legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile
world of panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human
beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption.
The poem's style is highly complex, erudite, and
allusive, and the poet provided notes and references to
explain the work's many quotations and allusions
"Tradition and the Individual Talent," appearing in his
first critical volume, The Sacred Wood (1920),

Eliot asserts that tradition, as used by the poet, is not a
mere repetition of the work of the immediate past
("novelty is better than repetition," he said); rather, it
comprises the whole of European literature from
Homer to the present. The poet writing in English may
therefore make his own tradition by using materials
from any past period, in any language. This point of
view is "programmatic" in the sense that it disposes the
reader to accept the revolutionary novelty of Eliot's
polyglot quotations and serious parodies of other poets'
styles in The Waste Land.
in The Sacred Wood, “Hamlet and His
Problems”
sets forth Eliot's theory of the objective correlative:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is
by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a
set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall
be the formula for that particular emotion; such that,
when the external facts, which must terminate in
sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked.
Eliot used the phrase "objective correlative" in the context
of his own impersonal theory of poetry; it thus had an
immense influence toward correcting the vagueness of
late Victorian rhetoric by insisting on a correspondence
of word and object.
The Metaphysical Poets" and "Andrew Marvell," published in
Selected Essays, 1917-32
he effects a new historical perspective on the hierarchy of
English poetry, putting at the top Donne and other
Metaphysical poets of the 17th century and lowering poets
of the 18th and 19th centuries. Eliot's second famous phrase
appears here--"dissociation of sensibility," invented to
explain the change that came over English poetry after
Donne and Andrew Marvell. This change seems to him to
consist in a loss of the union of thought and feeling. The
phrase has been attacked, yet the historical fact that gave
rise to it cannot be denied, and with the poetry of Eliot and
Pound it had a strong influence in reviving interest in certain
17th-century poets.
Eliot's masterpiece is The Four
Quartets


, which was issued as a book in 1943, though each
"quartet" is a complete poem. The first of the quartets,
"Burnt Norton," had appeared in the Collected Poems
of 1936. It is a subtle meditation on the nature of time
and its relation to eternity. On the model of this Eliot
wrote three more poems, "East Coker" (1940), "The
Dry Salvages" (1941), and "Little Gidding" (1942), in
which he explored through images of great beauty and
haunting power his own past, the past of the human
race, and the meaning of human history
This work led to the award to Eliot, in 1948, of the
Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)

The speaker of this ironic monologue is a modern, urban man
who, like many of his kind, feels isolated and incapable of
decisive action. Irony is apparent from the title, for this is not
a conventional love song. Prufrock would like to speak of love
to a woman, but he does not dare. The poem opens with a
quoted passage from Dante's INFERNO, suggesting that
Prufrock is one of the damned and that he speaks only because
he is sure no one will listen. Since the reader is overhearing
his thoughts, the poem seems at first rather incoherent. But
Prufrock repeats certain phrases and returns to certain core
ideas as the poem progresses. The "you and I" of the opening
line includes the reader, suggesting that only by accompanying
Prufrock can one understand his problems.


Dedication: Dedicated to Jean Verdenal, a
friend of Eliot's who was killed in 1915 on the
Anglo-French expedition to the Dardanelles.
Title: Originally titled "Prufrock Among the
Women". "J. Alfred Prufrock" follows the early
form of Eliot's signature "T. Stearns Eliot".
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock(1915)
S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
(Epigraph: These lines are taken from Dante's "Inferno", and are spoken by the character of
Count Guido da Montefelltro. Dante meets the punished Guido in the Eighth chasm of
Hell. Guido explains that he is speaking freely to Dante only because he believes Dante
is one of the dead who could never return to earth to report what he says. Translated
from the original Italian, the lines are as follows: "If I thought that my reply would be to
someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further
movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I
can answer you with no fear of infamy." )
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The images of the opening lines depict a drab neighborhood of
cheap hotels and restaurants, where Prufrock lives in solitary
gloom. In line 12 he suggests making a visit, and immediately
his mind calls up an image of the place he and the reader will
go-- perhaps an afternoon tea at which various women drop in
and engage in polite chitchat about Michelangelo, who was a
man of great creative energy, unlike Prufrock
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

The next stanza creates an image of the dull, damp
autumn evening when the tea party will take place.
In the rest of the poem Prufrock imagines his
arrival, his attempt to converse intimately with the
woman whose love he seeks, and his ultimate failure
to make her understand him. Prufrock has attended
such parties many times and knows how it will be,
and this knowledge makes him hesitate out of fear
that any attempt to push beyond mere polite
conversation, to make some claim on the woman's
affections, will meet with a frustratingly polite
refusal.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

So Prufrock simultaneously plans his approach and tells himself that
he can put off the action. The phrase "There will be time," repeated
five times between lines 23 and 36, represents his hesitation and
delay. When he says in lines 44 and 45 "Do I dare/ Disturb the
universe?," the universe he is referring to is his small social circle of
middle-class acquaintances. He would disturb its equilibrium if he
actually tried to sing a "love song" to one of them. He already "knows
them all" and knows that they do not expect much from him. He tries,
starting at line 70, to rehearse a speech he might make to one
particular woman, but he gives up almost as soon as he has started,
saying that it would be better to be merely a crab rather than a
human being who has to make love speeches and ask for affection
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

Deciding not to try, Prufrock questions whether his efforts
would have been worthwhile. He excuses his fear by
rationalizing that his speaking to the woman would not have
achieved any real response. In line 110 Prufrock contrasts
himself to Hamlet, a hero who hesitated but finally acted
decisively. But Prufrock sees himself as more like Polonius, the
old fool from the same play. Prufrock will retreat into a
solitary, dignified old age. He has gone past dreams of
romance into the sober but empty existence of a passionless
old man.
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
.
.
.
.
.
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I
should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
.
.
.
.
.
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

For many readers in the 1920s, Prufrock seemed to
epitomize the frustration and impotence of the modern
individual. He seemed to represent thwarted desires
and modern disillusionment. Such phrases as "I have
measured out my life in coffee spoons" (line 51)
capture the sense of the unheroic nature of life in the
twentieth century. Prufrock's weaknesses could be
mocked, but he is a pathetic figure, not grand enough
to be tragic.
It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical
modern man

--overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally
stilted. Prufrock, the poem's speaker, seems to be
addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like
to "force the moment to its crisis" by somehow
consummating their relationship. But Prufrock knows
too much of life to "dare" an approach to the woman: In
his mind he hears the comments others make about
his inadequacies, and he chides himself for
"presuming" emotional interaction could be possible at
all.


The poem moves from a series of fairly concrete (for
Eliot) physical settings--a cityscape (the famous
"patient etherised upon a table") and several interiors
(women's arms in the lamplight, coffee spoons,
fireplaces)--to a series of vague ocean images
conveying Prufrock's emotional distance from the world
as he comes to recognize his second-rate status ("I am
not Prince Hamlet").
"Prufrock" is powerful for its range of intellectual
reference and also for the vividness of character
achieved.

The rhyme scheme of this poem is irregular but not random. While
sections of the poem may resemble free verse, in reality,
"Prufrock" is a carefully structured amalgamation of poetic forms.
The bits and pieces of rhyme become much more apparent when
the poem is read aloud. One of the most prominent formal
characteristics of this work is the use of refrains. Prufrock's
continual return to the "women [who] come and go / Talking of
Michelangelo" and his recurrent questionings ("how should I
presume?") and pessimistic appraisals ("That is not it, at all.") both
reference an earlier poetic tradition and help Eliot describe the
consciousness of a modern, neurotic individual.

Prufrock's obsessiveness is aesthetic, but it is also a sign of
compulsiveness and isolation. Another important formal feature is
the use of fragments of sonnet form, particularly at the poem's
conclusion. The three three-line stanzas are rhymed as the
conclusion of a Petrarchan sonnet would be, but their pessimistic,
anti-romantic content, coupled with the despairing interjection, "I
do not think they (the mermaids) would sing to me," creates a
contrast that comments bitterly on the bleakness of modernity.

Prufrock" displays the two most important characteristics of Eliot's
early poetry. First, it is strongly influenced by the French
Symbolists, like Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Baudelaire, whom Eliot
had been reading almost constantly while writing the poem. From
the Symbolists, Eliot takes his sensuous language and eye for
unnerving or anti-aesthetic detail that nevertheless contributes to
the overall beauty of the poem (the yellow smoke and the haircovered arms of the women are two good examples of this). The
Symbolists, too, privileged the same kind of individual Eliot
creates with Prufrock: the moody, urban, isolated-yet-sensitive
thinker. However, whereas the Symbolists would have been more
likely to make their speaker himself a poet or artist, Eliot chooses
to make Prufrock an unacknowledged poet, a sort of artist for the
common man.

The second defining characteristic of this poem is its use of fragmentation
and juxtaposition. Eliot sustained his interest in fragmentation and its
applications throughout his career, and his use of the technique changes
in important ways across his body of work: Here, the subjects undergoing
fragmentation (and reassembly) are mental focus and certain sets of
imagery. The kinds of imagery Eliot uses also suggest that something
new can be made from the ruins: The series of hypothetical encounters at
the poem's center are iterated and discontinuous but nevertheless lead to
a sort of epiphany (albeit a dark one) rather than just leading nowhere.
Eliot also introduces an image that will recur in his later poetry, that of the
scavenger. Prufrock thinks that he "should have been a pair of ragged
claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Crabs are scavengers,
garbage-eaters who live off refuse that makes its way to the sea floor.

Prufrock" ends with the hero assigning himself a role in
one of Shakespeare's plays: While he is no Hamlet, he
may yet be useful and important as "an attendant lord,
one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or
two…" This implies that there is still a continuity
between Shakespeare's world and ours, that Hamlet is
still relevant to us and that we are still part of a world
that could produce something like Shakespeare's
plays. Implicit in this, of course, is the suggestion that
Eliot, who has created an "attendant lord," may now go
on to create another Hamlet. While "Prufrock" ends
with a devaluation of its hero, it exalts its creator. Or
does it?


The last line of the poem suggests otherwise--that when the world
intrudes, when "human voices wake us," the dream is shattered:
"we drown." With this single line, Eliot dismantles the romantic
notion that poetic genius is all that is needed to triumph over the
destructive, impersonal forces of the modern world. In reality, Eliot
the poet is little better than his creation: He differs from Prufrock
only by retaining a bit of hubris, which shows through from time to
time. Eliot's poetic creation, thus, mirrors Prufrock's soliloquy: Both
are an expression of aesthetic ability and sensitivity that seems to
have no place in the modern world. This realistic, anti-romantic
outlook sets the stage for Eliot's later works, including The Waste
Land.