Authored By: Alexander Lynch

Edited By: N/A

A poet, dramatist, critic, editor, and publisher, Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) ranks among the most influential figures in twentieth-century European letters. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Eliot was the son of Henry Ware Eliot, a businessman and member of a distinguished Boston Brahmin family, and Charlotte Champe Eliot (née Stearns), a schoolteacher. Sure of Eliot’s promise, Charlotte sought to foster his academic growth: after Eliot completed primary school, Charlotte pushed to send him to a Washington University preparatory school, where he started a short-lived magazine and published his oldest surviving poems, before sending him to a Harvard preparatory college and, in 1906, to Harvard.

While at Harvard, where he studied a broad range of subjects with a focus on philosophy and literature, Eliot formed many of the interests and relationships that would shape his early career. In 1908, he encountered the work of Jules Laforgue in Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899), “one of those [books] which have affected the course of my life” (qtd. in Crawford 110). The French poet’s cool detachment and dandyish posture, of the kind Eliot had first admired in Baudelaire, decisively moulded the poems he soon began to draft. These poems—among them “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady” (both 1915)—would form the bulk of his first published collection. Eliot’s admiration for Dante, cultivated in his classes with the philosophers George Santayana and George Herbert Palmer, was another key early influence. In 1909, Eliot was elected to the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate, in whose pages he published several poems and essays. While on the board, Eliot also solidified what would be a lifelong friendship with the poet Conrad Aiken. After graduating in 1910, Eliot spent a personally and artistically transformative academic year studying philosophy at the graduate level on exchange at the Sorbonne, during which time he completed many of his most significant early poems. Eliot returned to Harvard in 1911, where he met Emily Hale, with whom he fell in love. Eliot confessed as much to Hale in the summer of 1914 in advance of another anticipated departure for Europe, but she did not share his feelings.[1] Eliot soon left for the University of Marburg to continue his doctoral reading, focused on the work of F. H. Bradley, but the looming war forced him to travel to London, bound ultimately for Oxford.

In London, Eliot befriended several prominent literary figures. On Aiken’s advice, Eliot met with Ezra Pound, who was enchanted by the draft of “Prufrock” that Eliot showed him in September of 1914: “He has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own” (80), Pound wrote to Harriet Monroe, for whose Chicago magazine, Poetry, Pound was London correspondent. It was to Pound that Eliot owed his first publication, that of “Prufrock,” which Monroe published in June 1915 due in large part to Pound’s hectoring. Poetry also published seven of the eleven other poems included in Eliot’s first collection between its October 1915 and September 1916 issues. Pound introduced Eliot to many other writers living in London, including Richard Aldington, H. D., Ford Hermann Madox Hueffer (later Ford Madox Ford), and Wyndham Lewis, who published Eliot’s “Preludes” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” in the second and final issue of his periodical Blast. Pound turned next to Harriet Shaw Weaver, for whose Egoist magazine he served as a talent scout, and pressed her to publish a book of Eliot’s poems on his subsidy. The fruit of Pound’s efforts: the Egoist published Prufrock and Other Observations, Eliot’s first collection, in June 1917. The collection sold poorly and received rather tepid reviews.[2]

Having all but abandoned his plans to become an academic in the United States to remain in England after his 1915 marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood Eliot, Eliot was by this time working in the Foreign Department at Lloyds Bank, teaching extensions courses on literature, and publishing reviews and essays in the New Statesman and the International Journal of Ethics (with the support of Bertrand Russell, whom Eliot befriended at Oxford after encounters at Harvard). Despite these involvements, Pound encouraged Weaver to hire Eliot as an assistant editor for the Egoist, subsidized, on Pound’s solicitation, by John Quinn, an American lawyer who helped publish many avant-garde artists. Eliot relished this position, his first editorship. It offered him the freedom to explore his literary-critical views in articles of his own design (most notably, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” [1919]), commission articles, and edit proofs, in all a substantial increase in Eliot’s literary “power” (Letters 1.330). During his time with the Egoist, which ended with the closing of the magazine in 1919, Eliot helped publish early chapters of James Joyce’s serialized Ulysses and work by Lewis and the Imagists, particularly Pound. Bertrand Russell introduced Eliot to Lady Ottoline Morrell, a patron of the arts and his long-time lover, beginning Eliot’s involvement with members of Bloomsbury, whom Morrell often hosted on social occasions. Eliot’s alternately amicable and antagonistic relationship with John Middleton Murry, editor of the Athenaeum and husband of Katherine Mansfield, offered him another channel for his reviews. Eliot’s early critical work so impressed Bruce Richmond, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, that, after Aldington introduced the pair, Richmond invited Eliot to write for the TLS, beginning the poet’s lifelong involvement with the magazine. This early period of literary involvements in London culminated in the publication of two collections of poetry, primarily comprising poems published in the July 1917 and September 1918 issues of the American periodical The Little Review: the Hogarth Press publication of the sixteen-page pamphlet Poems in 1919, which the Woolfs had solicited on the advice of Roger Fry, and the Ovid Press 1920 publication of Ara Vos Prec, which expanded and revised the Hogarth Poems and became Eliot’s first collection to be published in the United States when Knopf revised it in turn and published it as Poems later that year. Eliot’s published range soon broadened further upon Methuen’s publication of The Sacred Wood (1920; Knopf, 1921), his first collection of essays.

In 1921, Eliot took on the difficult task of managing the Criterion, a quarterly review that Viscountess Lilian Rothermere, the estranged wife of the proprietor of the Daily Mail, had asked him to establish and edit on her funding. The Criterion (the title was Vivien’s suggestion) was a crucial forum for Eliot’s poetic and professional development. Rejecting the national model of most contemporary British periodicals, which he saw as provincial, Eliot endeavoured in the Criterion to gather a pan-European “phalanx” of intellectuals, predominantly conservative but above all artistically radical, who might oppose what he saw as a hostile and overly commercialized print journalism industry. The Criterion, printed by Richard Cobden-Sanderson, sometimes achieved its stated goals: in its first year, it featured works by Hermann Hesse, Roger Fry, Luigi Pirandello, Julien Benda, Virginia Woolf, Herbert Read, Paul Valéry, W. B. Yeats, E. M. Forster, and Aldington; it was, moreover, the first English review to print works by Paul Valéry and Marcel Proust. In brief, the Criterion offered Eliot a vital opportunity to shape European letters and, thus, the attitudes of the audience of his own poems and of his allies’ works.

Standing first among these poems, as planning for the Criterion commenced in the summer of 1921, was The Waste Land, then a frustratingly incomplete collection of drafts. 1921 was a straining year for Eliot, owing to his various literary commitments, his work at the bank, and the multiplying illnesses of his wife, and he was forced to pause work on the poem and the Criterion for two recuperative trips late in the year: the first to Margate, the second to a sanatorium in Lausanne. During and after Eliot’s time in Paris, his return stop, in January 1922, Pound helped him extract from these drafts The Waste Land as eventually published. The final poem was half as long as its drafts, with the removal of many of its narrative sections rendering it, as Robert Crawford writes, “more cubist or kaleidoscopic” (Young Eliot 401).

The complex publication history of The Waste Land befits the complexity of the poem. Scofield Thayer, whom Eliot had befriended in prep school, offered him $150 (~£35) for the poem, sight unseen, for the New York magazine Dial, but Eliot demanded £50 for it in a garbled telegram that seemed to request £856. Naturally, Thayer refused. Via Quinn, Eliot then contracted to publish the poem with the New York firm Boni & Liveright in December 1922 after an initial meeting with Liveright during his stay in Paris. This edition featured Eliot’s infamous notes to the poem, which, to his later regret, Eliot had used to expand the work from pamphlet- to book-length. Pound persisted in negotiations with Thayer, both directly and via Quinn, however, and finally resolved the Dial payment dispute by ensuring that Eliot would receive the magazine’s annual $2,000 (~£465) prize for outstanding poetic achievement. This done, Quinn arranged for The Waste Land to be published in the November 1922 Dial. This arrangement was complemented by the publication of The Waste Land in the first issue of the Criterion, which finally appeared in October 1922 after more than a year of preparations, and as a Hogarth Press pamphlet (the poem’s first British edition) in September 1923. While the poem’s reception was not univocally positive, reviews generally acknowledged that The Waste Land signaled Eliot’s “arrival” at the forefront of English letters.[3]

The Criterion, however, quickly became troublesome. Much to his distress, Eliot’s Lloyds contract prevented him from being paid for his work on the journal; for perhaps the same reason, his name did not appear on the masthead. Eliot resented his long hours at the bank, fearing that they impeded his poetic flourishing. Accordingly, Pound sought to establish a subscriber-based “Eliot Fellowship Fund,” part a broader “Bel Esprit” artist-support scheme, that might free Eliot from Lloyds. Eliot asked him to put an end to this fund after it became embarrassingly public when, in November 1922, the Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury published false stories about Eliot’s pocketing the money without resigning from Lloyds. Eliot’s inability to complete the verse play Sweeney Agonistes compounded these anxieties. By 1924, Eliot felt that he was approaching the end of his poetic career; indeed, he was so unsure of his work at this time that he thought it necessary to retain a non-artistic job, whether at Lloyds or elsewhere. He must have shared all of this with author and journalist Charles Whibley, who introduced him, in December 1924, to Geoffrey Faber, who was working to expand the general publishing arm of his firm, Faber & Gwyer, then focused on technical and medical publications. Though Faber was only seeking a part-time advisor, Eliot’s blend of creative talent, editing skill, and business acumen (this last fostered by his time at Lloyds) impressed Faber enough that he hired Eliot as a full-time literary advisor with responsibility for Faber & Gwyer’s poetry list; by April 1925, Eliot was an F&G director. This association with F&G (renamed Faber & Faber in 1929 after the withdrawal of the Gwyer interest) would continue until Eliot’s death. It was a boon for Eliot in large part because it eliminated the demands of luck and perseverance under which emerging writers suffer: Faber had first refusal rights on Eliot’s work, functionally guaranteeing a publishing home for him.

More immediately, Eliot’s new position at Faber provided him with an easy solution when Lady Rothermere, dissatisfied with the “dull” Criterion, refused to continue as its sole backer in the summer of 1925. After extended negotiations, Rothermere and F&G agreed to publish the Criterion as a new review, the New Criterion. Still, when the journal was re-released in January 1926—including, in its first issue, work by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, and Gertrude Stein—many doubted that it could succeed in the long term. Though Faber’s stated aims for the journal were publicity and talent acquisition for his firm, he repeatedly noted in letters to Eliot that the journal was troublingly unprofitable. Due to the narrow readership of the journal—a consequence, its editors held, of the erudition of its contents—it never earned money. Still, with the publication of Poems, 1909–1925 by F&G later in 1925—which debuted the full version of “The Hollow Men,” parts of which had previously been re-/published in the Criterion, the Dial, Harold Monro’s Chapbook, and Eliot’s relative Marguerite Caetani’s Commerce—Eliot’s “Faber era” had begun. This publication angered the Woolfs, who saw it as poaching their writer. This was prescient: after Homage to John Dryden (1924), a collection of three 1921 essays, Hogarth never again published work by Eliot.

The late 20s and early 30s saw Eliot consolidate his high standing in Europe and the United States. Still, the Criterion continued to pose challenges for him and Faber. In an attempt to grow its readership, Eliot published the Criterion as a monthly from May to December 1927, but he stopped after Lady Rothermere withdrew from the project altogether, citing its increased cost and continued staleness. Faber found backers to maintain the review, though continued financial difficulties prompted a return to quarterly publication shortly thereafter. There were bright spots: in addition to publishing Pound’s A Draft of XXX Cantos (in 1933) and securing Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (in 1931; published in 1939) for Faber, Eliot published W. H. Auden’s Paid On Both Sides with the Criterion in January 1930 and Auden’s Poems in October of that year with Faber, introducing the poet to the literary world.[4] Such acts of promotion fostered a new generation of Faber writers—Auden, Stephen Spender, and Louis MacNeice chief among them—who grew in prominence during the 30s.[5] Eliot also used his position at the Criterion to steward broader critical debates: his editorial commentaries enabled him to engage several other British periodicals in extended public dialogues—most famously, a 1923–27 debate with Murry’s Adelphi on the merits of “romanticism” (Murry’s position) as against those of “classicism” (Eliot’s). While Eliot’s poetic production slowed during this period (he published only very short poems between 1925 and 1930), his work at Faber ultimately replenished his creative energies. Late in 1926, Eliot was asked to contribute to a new Faber Christmas series, the “Ariel” set, which featured commissioned holiday-themed poems by prominent contemporary writers such as Thomas Hardy, Henry Newbolt, Laurence Binyon, and Siegfried Sassoon. Eliot’s first Ariel contribution, “Journey of the Magi”—written for his first Christmas after his reception into the Church of England in June 1927—inaugurated a period of more explicitly religious writing that culminated in “Ash-Wednesday,” whose initially unrelated parts Eliot composed in 1927 and 1928. The poems that would form parts one through three of the final version were published in Commerce and the Saturday Review of Literature in those years; parts four through six Eliot included only in the final version of the poem, which was published by Faber in London and G. P. Putnam’s Sons in New York in 1930. After the publication of “Ash-Wednesday,” Eliot experienced another five-year creative drought.

With the publication of his Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (Faber, 1932; Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932) and Collected Poems, 1909–1935 (Faber, 1936; Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936), Eliot became ever more secure in his standing even as he became, to some readers, passé. In the 30s and 40s, he became a more prolific critic, delivering many lectures, most of which were published by Faber in London and Harcourt, Brace and Company in the United States. Eliot also wrote his first dramas during this period, beginning with The Rock (Faber, 1934; Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934), written for a church pageant, and continuing with Murder in the Cathedral (Faber, 1935; Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935) and The Family Reunion (Faber, 1939; Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1939). In addition to his leading role in Faber’s poetry selections, Eliot published works by Charles Williams, Lawrence Durrell, and Marianne Moore during these years; edited, published, and assisted with the American publication of Djuna Barnes’s controversial Nightwood (Faber, 1936; Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1937); and—among his most infamous misses—rejected the manuscript of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (in 1944). This period also saw his separation from Vivien in 1933[6] and, in 1939, the end of the Criterion, which had stood as a preeminent review of the 30s. In the wake of the Munich Pact between England, France, and Nazi Germany, Eliot came to believe that the opportunity for a unified and respectable European tradition, the goal of the journal, had passed.

Eliot’s other significant publishing engagements in the 30s and 40s were markedly, though not exclusively, Christian. (Indeed, as Jason Harding observes, many of the criticisms levelled at the Criterion in the 30s centred its “theological reorientation” [20].) The publishing history of Eliot’s last significant poetic production, Four Quartets (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1943; Faber, 1944), exemplifies this trend. Excepting “Burnt Norton,” which was first published in Collected Poems, 1909–1935, the poems that constitute Four Quartets were initially published in the New English Weekly (“East Coker” in 1940, “The Dry Salvages” in 1941, and “Little Gidding” in 1942) before their publication as four individual pamphlets (Faber, 1940–1941) and, later, as a standalone book. Eliot had been an editor of the NEW, managed by members of the Chandos Group since 1934, when he joined both periodical and group following the death of editor A. R. Orage, and remained with both until 1946.[7] The strong sales of the Quartets suggest that the sequence resonated with contemporary readers, at least in part as a result of its attention to the immediate context of its composition, the Second World War. For many, Four Quartets illustrated that for which Britain was fighting the war, including and especially Britain itself. Eliot’s fame, which this commercial success also indicates, culminated in his receiving both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

The final years of Eliot’s career are somewhat more obscure, in part because they were progressively less professionally and creatively productive. In 1957, he married Valerie Eliot (née Fletcher), his Faber secretary since 1949.[8] He continued to write plays—namely, The Cocktail Party (Faber, 1950; Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1950), The Confidential Clerk (Faber, 1954; Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954), and The Elder Statesman (Faber, 1959; Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959)—which were performed with some success. He continued to give lectures at universities and for fundraisers at charities, hospitals, and church groups in Britain, the United States, and Canada and to write criticism, though relatively fewer of his critical pieces in this period were significant than those of previous ones.[9] Of course, there are exceptions. Of particular importance are Notes towards the Definition of Culture (Faber, 1948; Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), in which Eliot develops his vision of a “European society,” as against the “Christian society” ideal he promoted in the 30s and earlier in the 40s; “The Three Voices of Poetry” (Cambridge UP, 1953 [UK] and 1954 [US]); and “The Frontiers of Criticism” (U of Minnesota P, 1956), which Eliot delivered before an audience of nearly 14,000 in a University of Minnesota football stadium. In this period, Eliot also took on more service work: he served terms as president of Books Across The Sea, the Fédération britannique des comités de l’Alliance française, the London Library, and the Poets’ Theatre Guild of the British Drama League (Complete Prose 8.xi). He also wrote more introductions, prefaces, and forewords in these years than at any point in his career (8.xli). In the last years of his life, Eliot pruned his corpus and reputation with an eye to posterity, publishing the complete edition of his plays in 1962 and that of his poems in 1963 (both with Faber, the latter with Harcourt, Brace & World). He died of emphysema in his London home on January 4, 1965.

[1] Eliot and Hale were to begin corresponding in 1930, many years after they met while Eliot was at Harvard. The contents of their correspondence, forthcoming at tseliot.com, reveal Eliot to have been romantically interested in Hale from the later years of his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood Eliot (m. 1915–1933) until his 1957 marriage to Valerie Eliot, when he abruptly stopped writing to her.

[2] See, for instance, Arthur Waugh, “The New Poetry,” Quarterly Review, October 1916, p. 226 (which denigrated “Prufrock” and Pound’s “Further Instructions,” among other poems); Times Literary Supplement, June 21, 1917; and “Recent Verse,” Literary World 83, July 5, 1917, p. 107. For Pound’s defence of Eliot against Waugh’s review, see “Drunk Helots and Mr. Eliot,” Egoist, June 1917, pp. 72–74.

[3] For positive reviews, see Times Literary Supplement, October 26, 1922; Edmund Wilson, “The Poetry of Drouth,” Dial 73, December 1922, pp. 611–616; and Conrad Aiken, “An Anatomy of Melancholy,” New Republic 33, February 7, 1923, pp. 294–295. For negative reviews, see Louis Untermeyer, “Disillusion vs. Dogma,” Freemen 6, January 17, 1923, p. 453, and J. C. Squire, “Poetry,” London Mercury 8, October 1923, pp. 655–656.

[4] Eliot would also publish the first two sections of Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabelle (1930) and Haveth Childers Everywhere (1931), in the Criterion Miscellany series (1929–36), the small publishing arm of the journal.

[5] Notably, all three of these writers were also published by Hogarth; these instances of competition between Hogarth and Faber repeated that which surrounded Eliot’s Poems, 1909–1925.

[6] Eliot arranged for a formal separation from Vivien following a marriage troubled by both spouses’ infidelity, substance abuse, and many illnesses. Vivien died in 1947, following her committal to Northumberland House, a psychiatric hospital, in 1938.

[7] Chandos comprised intellectuals interested in Christian social thought. Eliot was also an originating member of the Moot, a group of Christian intellectuals with broader social and political concerns than Chandos. The Moot met several times a year between 1938 and 1947. This involvement resulted in Eliot’s guest-editing several issues of the Christian News-Letter, managed by members of the Moot, between 1939 and 1942.

[8] Following Eliot’s death, Valerie managed his estate and spearheaded the collection, editing, and annotation of his work and letters until her death in 2012.

[9] In the Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (1975; ed. Frank Kermode), for instance, there appears only one essay written after 1948 (“Poetry and Drama” [1951]). In his introduction to the Selected Prose, Kermode observes—referencing “To Criticize the Critic,” a 1961 lecture in which Eliot summarized his critical career—that “Eliot was clearly right in supposing that the most influential of his essays were among the earliest” (13).