For instance, though Ransom negatively criticised The Waste Land for its "extreme disconnection", Ransom was not completely condemnatory of Eliot's work and admitted that Eliot was a talented poet.

Eliot: Poems E-Text: Sweeney Among the Nightingales E-Text T.S. 12. Like “Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service”, this poem was completed around June 1918, and first published in the Chicago Little Review, September 1918. [30] This, coupled with apparent mental instability, meant that she was often sent away by Eliot and her doctors for extended periods of time in the hope of improving her health, and as time went on, he became increasingly detached from her. It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere. "[36], By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. Late in his career, Eliot focused much of his creative energy on writing for the theatre; some of his earlier critical writing, in essays such as "Poetry and Drama",[90] "Hamlet and his Problems",[84] and "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama",[91] focused on the aesthetics of writing drama in verse. Published in 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when a person who has lacked faith acquires it. The philosopher Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. / Money in furs. For instance, the editors of The Norton Anthology of English Literature write, "There is no disagreement on [Eliot's] importance as one of the great renovators of the English poetry dialect, whose influence on a whole generation of poets, critics, and intellectuals generally was enormous. He first visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer programme, but when the First World War broke out he went to Oxford instead. [42], One of Eliot's biographers, Peter Ackroyd, commented that "the purposes of [Eliot's conversion] were two-fold. [28], After a short visit alone to his family in the United States, Eliot returned to London and took several teaching jobs, such as lecturing at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Eliot to Geoffrey Faber. Death and the Raven drift above I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. [39][40] About 30 years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament". "[10], From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, the boys college preparatory division of Washington University, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. They certainly have no relation to poetry. After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. In 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck, University of London. T.s eliot arouses pity without telling his pity for the people in morning at the window. [However] his range as a poet [was] limited, and his interest in the great middle ground of human experience (as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner) [was] deficient." Eliot said he found Joyce arrogant—Joyce doubted Eliot's ability as a poet at the time—but the two soon became friends, with Eliot visiting Joyce whenever he was in Paris. He was aware of this even early in his career. Craig Raine, in his books In Defence of T. S. Eliot (2001) and T. S. Eliot (2006), sought to defend Eliot from the charge of anti-Semitism. “Nightingales” refers to real-life nightingales, but also to prostitutes–Eliot once told Edmund Wilson that the poem is set in a bar where prostitutes ply their trade. [19] Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908 when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Eliot: Poems Sweeney Among the Nightingales [Greek text inserted here] Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees Letting his arms hang down to laugh, The zebra stripes along his jaw Swelling to maculate giraffe. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which to do it. "[109], Eliot influenced, among many others, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Díreáin, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Bob Dylan, Hart Crane, William Gaddis, Allen Tate, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Kamau Brathwaite,[110] Russell Kirk,[111] George Seferis (who in 1936 published a modern Greek translation of The Waste Land) and James Joyce. To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud. When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge, in 1965. Eliot: Poems study guide contains a biography of T.S. [8] In his memoir of Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot "would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living. "[103] Interpreting the line as an indirect comparison of Jews to rats, Julius writes: "The anti-Semitism is unmistakable. When Agamemnon cried aloud, "[105] In another review of Raine's 2006 book, the literary critic Terry Eagleton also questioned the validity of Raine's defence of Eliot's character flaws as well as the entire basis for Raine's book, writing, "Why do critics feel a need to defend the authors they write on, like doting parents deaf to all criticism of their obnoxious children? I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention"[68], The poem is known for its obscure nature—its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. The play featured "Sweeney", a character who had appeared in a number of his poems. These scenes, titled Fragment of a Prologue (1926) and Fragment of an Agon (1927), were published together in 1932 as Sweeney Agonistes.

This first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover. "Burnt Norton" is a meditative poem that begins with the narrator trying to focus on the present moment while walking through a garden, focusing on images and sounds such as the bird, the roses, clouds and an empty pool. Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965) was an American-born British poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. [12], A pageant play by Eliot called The Rock was performed in 1934 for the benefit of churches in the Diocese of London.