He returned to Harvard in 1911 but in 1914 he went overseas again on a Harvard scholarship to study in Germany. When World War I (1914–18; a war fought between the German-led Central powers and the Allies: England, the United States, and France, among other nations) broke out, he transferred to Merton College, Oxford.
Eliot is timeless. More than any other poet of his day and age, he pushed back the boundaries of what poetry was capable of, showing us a different world, written in a completely different poetic language, that influenced successive generations of poets and still influences many of them today.
T. S.Eliot's playful cat poems have delighted readers and cat lovers around the world ever since they were first published in 1939. They were originally composed for his godchildren, with Eliot posing as Old Possum himself, and later inspired the legendary musical "Cats."
T. S. Eliot
| T. S. Eliot OM |
|---|
| Period | 1905–1965 |
| Literary movement | Modernism |
| Notable works | "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) The Waste Land (1922) Four Quartets (1943) Murder in the Cathedral (1935) |
| Notable awards | Nobel Prize in Literature (1948) Order of Merit (1948) |
He devoted a further year (1915-1916) to a doctoral dissertation on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley, eventually published in 1964. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Eliot emphasized language and literature—Latin, Greek, German, and French.
The Waste Land is widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry. While it is not considered as Eliot's masterpiece by many critics, it is undoubtedly his most famous poem.
Sir Thomas Elyot's The Boke Named the Governour, from which Eliot quotes here ('In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie'), was published just before the Protestant Reformation occurred and England would undergo a dramatic religious change, with Henry VIII breaking with Rome (i.e. Roman Catholicism) and declaring himself
East Coker is described as a poem of late summer, earth, and faith. As in the other poems of the Four Quartets, each of the five sections holds a theme that is common to each of the poems: time, experience, purgation, prayer, and wholeness.
The title is a quotation from the T. S. Eliot poem East Coker, which is taken in turn from "En ma Fin gît mon Commencement", the saying Mary, Queen of Scots, embroidered on her cloth of estate whilst in prison in England.
“In my end is my beginning,” T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets. He meant something specific about circularity and the spiritual journey he was undertaking, but the line has more than one application, and I find it works to designate certain tactics or challenges that poets may employ to jump-start their imaginations.
(The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts. Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.
Four Quartets is a set of
four poems written by T. S.
Eliot that were published over a six-year period. The first poem, Burnt Norton, was published with a collection of his early works (1936's Collected Poems 1909–1935.)
Four Quartets.
| First US edition published by Harcourt |
|---|
| Author | T. S. Eliot |
|---|
| Pages | 40 |
