Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on Septemin St. In both capacities he worked behind the scenes to nurture the intellectual and spiritual life of his times. From 1922 to 1939 he was the editor of a major intellectual journal, The Criterion, and from 1925 to 1965 he was an editor/director in the publishing house of Faber and Faber. Eliot also made significant contributions as an editor and publisher. His work has influenced several important 20th-century playwrights, including W.H. He experimented with language that, though close to contemporary speech, is essentially poetic and thus capable of spiritual, emotional, and intellectual resonance. His goal, realized only in part, was the revitalization of poetic drama in terms that would be consistent with the modern age. By the mid 1920s he was writing a play, Sweeney Agonistes (published in 1932, performed in 1933) in the 1930s he wrote an ecclesiastical pageant, The Rock (performed and published in 1934), and two full-blown plays, Murder in the Cathedral (performed and published in 1935) and The Family Reunion (performed and published in 1939) and in the late 1940s and the 1950s he devoted himself almost exclusively to plays, of which The Cocktail Party (performed in 1949, published in 1950) has been the most popular. He was inclined from the first toward the theater-his early poems are essentially dramatic, and many of his early essays and reviews are on drama or dramatists. These writings, sympathetically read, suggest the dilemma of the serious observer of Western culture in the 1930s, and rightly understood, they complement his poetry, plays, and literary journalism.Įliot is also an important figure in 20th-century drama. In these writings, such as The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), he can be seen as a deeply involved and thoughtful Christian poet in the process of making sense of the world between the two World Wars.
Beginning in the late 1920s, Eliot’s literary criticism was supplemented by religious and social criticism.
Through half a century of critical writing, Eliot’s concerns remained more or less constant his position regarding those concerns, however, was frequently refined, revised, or, occasionally, reversed. Richards, the basis of the New Criticism, one of the most influential schools of literary study in the 20th century. His ideas quickly solidified into doctrine and became, with the early essays of I.A. A product of his critical intelligence and superb training in philosophy and literature, his essays, however hastily written and for whatever motive, had an immediate impact. This early criticism was produced at night under the pressure of supplementing his meager salary-first as a teacher, then as a bank clerk-and not, as is sometimes suggested, under the compulsion to rewrite literary history. From 1916 through 1921 he contributed approximately one hundred reviews and articles to various periodicals. The culmination of this search as well as of Eliot’s poetic writing is his meditation on time and history, the works known collectively as Four Quartets (1943): Burnt Norton (1941), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942).Įliot was almost as renowned a literary critic as he was a poet. Conspicuously different in style and tone from his earlier work, this confessional sequence charts his continued search for order in his personal life and in history. In 1930 he published his next major poem, Ash-Wednesday, written after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. Eliot later denied that he had large cultural problems in mind, but, nevertheless, in The Waste Land he diagnosed the malaise of his generation and indeed of Western civilization in the 20th century. While the origins of The Waste Land are in part personal, the voices projected are universal. Within a few years he had composed another landmark poem, “ Gerontion” (1920), and within a decade, one of the most famous and influential poems of the century, The Waste Land(1922). In these college poems, Eliot articulated distinctly modern themes in forms that were both a striking development of and a marked departure from those of 19th-century poetry. Alfred Prufrock” and other poems that are landmarks in the history of literature. In 19, while still a college student, he wrote “ The Love Song of J. Eliot, the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the giants of modern literature, highly distinguished as a poet, literary critic, dramatist, and editor and publisher.
0 kommentar(er)
