DOCSLIB.ORG

CHAPTER VII the PLAYS the Purpose of This Chapter Is Limited

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
CHAPTER VII the PLAYS the Purpose of This Chapter Is Limited CHAPTER VII THE PLAYS The purpose of this chapter is limited obviously because by the time Eliot's active dramatic career began, the knight stage of his development was long past and as such the saintly preoccupations of his later poetry dominate his plays. Secondly, like his criticism, Eliot's dramatic work springs from his poetry; it is an offshooot of the strong dramatic element in his poetry. In fact in "The Three Voices of Poetry", he regards dramatic poetry as the third voice. Basically, Eliot's interest in drama is that of a poet. His poetry and plays do not exist in separate compartments; the plays grow directly out of his poetic preoccupations. A piece of external evidence is that, as has been mentioned in the earlier chapter, one of the sources of "Burnt Norton" was the discarded fragment of Murder in the Cathedral. As Eliot himself pointed out in an interview, when he turned to the theatre, the experience of "writing plays ... made a difference to the writing of the Four Quartets".^' Thus admittedly there is some interaction between Eliot's poetry and plays. And this interaction was not on the level of style and presentation only. One can see how the themes of the middle and late poetry, which 383 themselves are modifications of his early themes, overflow into the plays. Thus, the chapter would like to stress that Eliot's dramatic career starts actively when the knight- stage of his development was long over; the knight had transformed himself into the saint and that its main pur­ pose is to show how the themes, that preoccupied Eliot in his poetry throughout, spill over into his plays. As in his early poetry, in his plays also Eliot followed the "mythical method", about which he had spoken in his review of Joyce's Ulysses. The chief advantage of this method was seen to be that "it makes modern world possible for art". Perhaps the attempt here is to give the saint­ ly explorations of modern life an archetypal significance. Thus whether in a hisotrical setting of Murder in the Cathe­ dral or in the contemporary setting of the other plays, there is an underlying mythic pattern. Murder in the Cathe­ dral is based on the Agamemnon myth, whereas Th^e Family / Reunion is a modern adaptation of the myth of Orestes. The Cocktail Party looks back to Euripides'a Alcestis. In The Confidential Clerk Eliot again goes back to Eunpides's play Ion, while The Elder Statesman is in a way a re-enactment of Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonnus. Myth and allusion, thus, s; form the substructure of his dramatic text. While the knowledge of the sources of the plays does enable the reader 384 to see how they operate on multiple planes of meaning and reality, it is not a pre-condition to grasp them at the superficial, literal level of action. In fact this mythical substructure is so unobstrusive that the source of The Cocktail Party was not found out till Eliot disclosed it. Thus when Eliot switched from the private realm of poetry to the public medium of drama, he took care to dilute the presence of myth and allusion in his work. As pointed out in the chapters dealing with his poetry, Eliot shows the predicament of a sensitive spirit, nurtured on Rubaiyat and the usual adolescent course of Romantic and pre-Raphaelite poetry, in the squalid modern world, which is termed as the 'irammense panorama of futili­ ty and anarchy' in his review of Joyce's Ulysses. Now in his plays also he is primarily interested in the condition of people with spiritual awareness and their encounter with those who are impervilis to any transcendental dimension of life. In her discussion of Sweeney Aqonistes Carol Smith points out, "He(Eliot) expresses in this fragmentary piece the theme which ... was to be his throughout virtually all of his dramatic work ; the dilemma of the spiritually aware individuals forced to exist in a world unav/are of spiritual 385 reality".^^^ Eliot had spoken of such spiritually unaware people in various contexts earlier. For instance he had character­ ized them as the people undone by death in The Waste Land, later on they became the hollow men. In essay "Baudldire", Eliot again spoke about them as those who are dehumanized by their moral neutrality. It is in the company of these waste-landers that a sensitive soul is forced to exist. Eliot fits here in the tradition of poets like Blake and Arnold. Blake's entier poetry for instance is a revolt against the ubiquitous Newtonian mechanistic conceptio of the universe. Similarly, Arnold in Empedocles on Etna and poems like "The Scholar-Gipsy" rages against the Philistin­ ism and the loss of the capacity for any faith in people. In his poetry upto The Waste Land, one of the complaints of Eliot against the modern world is the urban squalor and automatism of the metropolitan civilization, which has gone spiritually opaque. In the plays, the encounter between the aware and the unaware is dramatized. This theme is most prominent in Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion. In the fragment Sweeney Agoniates the stress is on the horror and pain of spiritual recognition and the difficul­ ties of a newly awakened soul to communicate his experience and awareness to others. In Murdar in the Cathedral, the 3 8r spiritually unregenerate people are represented by the Chorus, consisting of the Women of Canterbury. As they express their fears and expectations before Thomas's arriv­ al, they also describe themselves. 1) We have suffered various oppression^ But mostly we are left to our own devices And we are content if we are left alone CW) 2 We do not wish anything to happen Seven years we lived quietly Succeeded in avoiding notice Living and partly living. (115") They naturally fear the return of the Archibishop, for it will disturb the even tenor of their life. Thomas is a man who is on a different spiritual plane, altogether , a man who is not afraid to take moral stances and act accord­ ingly. Now I fear the disturbance of the quiet seasons Winter shall come bringing death from the sea These Women of Canterbury want Thomas to return to France, for with his entry into Canterbury they will be forced to shed their moral non-alignment. 38? O Thomas, return, Archbishop; return, return to France Return. Quickly. Quietly. Leave us to perish in quiet. CK) In The Family Reunion, Harry enters the stage with y vision of the supernatural. He is the one who sees tho Furies, while his mother, aunts, and uncles, with the ho­ nourable exception of Agatha, fail to see them. Look there 1 Can't you see them? YOu don't see them, but I see them And they see me. (C'~\) They do not understand what Harry is talking about. And naturally enough. For Charles, Gerald and Ivy have gone through life as a series of disconnected events, without realising their significance. For them Time is neatly divided into the past, present and future. As Harry tells them. You are people To whom nothing has happened, at most a continual impact Of external events. you have gone through life in 388 sleep. Never woken to nightmare. I tell you life would be unendurable If you are wide awake • • • Of the past you can only see what is past Not what is always present. (CC-C^) In the words of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" Harry's spiritually blind uncles and aunts lack "the histor­ ical sense". It is not as if all the characters except the protag­ onist are spiritually impervious. Connected with the clash between the awares and the unawares is the figure of the spiritual guide, whom one saw before in Ash-Wednesday in the form of the Lady in a white gown. In Murder in the Cathedral Thomas, after struggling like St. Paul, with the spectres of his own mind emerges from the battle triumphant and attains to sainthood. But Harry needs Agatha to guide him on to his path of salvation. His sense of guilt goes away only after she tells him how she loved his father and how he wanted to kill Amy, who was at the time expecting Harry. This is how Harry comes to >now the aetiology of his delusion of having killed his wife. Armed with this knowl- 389 edge, Harry now can face the Eumenides; they no longer frighten him. They are not now instruments of torture but the agents of his purification and salvation. Seen in this aspect, the Eumenides perform the same function as the threo white leopards do in Ash-Wednesday. In The Cocktail Party, Edward, Lavinia and Celia ari helped by the "guardians' in the form of Sir Henry Reilly, Tulia and Alex. Sir Reilly reconciles Edward and Lavinia and sends Celia to his "sanatorium" where she wins her martyrdom. Eggerson, in The Confidential Clerk, shows Colby that the rose-garden cannot be used for escapist reasons but has to be integrated to life and thus, he becomes the real father to Colby. Sir Claude despite his desire, turns out to be cherishing the illusion of Colby's fatherhood. Ho cannot be colby'a father in the sense that he himself is as much deluded in his life as is his wife. In The Elder Statesman, Lord Claverton is able to die in peace and serenity as much by his own efforts of coming to terms with the ghosts of his past as by Monica's Antigone like filial affection• These guides help the protagonists to attain salva­ tion, which invariably takes the form of redeeming time.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • TS ELIOT's PLAYS and RECEPTION Eliot's
    T.S. ELIOT’s PLAYS and RECEPTION Eliot’s plays, which begin with Sweeney Agonistes (published 1926; first performed in 1934) and end with The Elder Statesman (first performed 1958; published 1959), are, with the exception of Murder in the Cathedral (published and performed 1935), inferior to the lyric and meditative poetry. Eliot’s belief that even secular drama attracts people who unconsciously seek a religion led him to put drama above all other forms of poetry. All his plays are in a blank verse of his own invention, in which the metrical effect is not apprehended apart from the sense; thus he brought “poetic drama” back to the popular stage. The Family Reunion (1939) and Murder in the Cathedral are Christian tragedies—the former a tragedy of revenge, the latter of the sin of pride. Murder in the Cathedral is a modern miracle play on the martyrdom of Thomas Becket. The most striking feature of this, his most successful play, is the use of a chorus in the traditional Greek manner to make apprehensible to common humanity the meaning of the heroic action. The Family Reunion (1939) was less popular. It contains scenes of great poignancy and some of the finest dramatic verse since the Elizabethans, but the public found this translation of the story of Orestes into a modern domestic drama baffling and was uneasy at the mixture of psychological realism, mythical apparitions at a drawing-room window, and a comic chorus of uncles and aunts. After World War II, Eliot returned to writing plays with The Cocktail Party in 1949, The Confidential Clerk in 1953, and The Elder Statesman in 1958.
    [Show full text]
  • Unit-1 T. S. Eliot : Religious Poems
    UNIT-1 T. S. ELIOT : RELIGIOUS POEMS Structure 1.0 Objectives 1.1 Introduction 1.2 ‘A Song for Simeon’ 1.3 ‘Marina’ 1.4 Let us sum up 1.5 Review Questions 1.6 A Select Bibliography 1.0 Objectives The present unit aims at acquainting you with some of T.S. Eliot’s poems written after his confirmation into the Anglo-Catholic Church of England in 1927. With this end in view, this unit takes up a close reading of two of his ‘Ariel Poems’ and focuses on some traits of his religious poetry. 1.1 Introduction Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26th September, 1888 at St. Louis, Missouri, an industrial city in the center of the U.S.A. He was the seventh and youngest child of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns. He enjoyed a long life span of more than seventy-five years. His period of active literary production extended over a period of forty-five years. Eliot’s Calvinist (Puritan Christian) ancestors on father’s side had migrated in 1667 from East Coker in Somersetshire, England to settle in a colony of New England on the eastern coast of North America. His grandfather, W.G. Eliot, moved in 1834 from Boston to St. Louis where he established the first Unitarian Church. His deep academic interest led him to found Washington University there. He left behind him a number of religious writings. Eliot’s mother was an enthusiastic social worker as well as a writer of caliber. His family background shaped his poetic sensibility and contributed a lot to his development as a writer, especially as a religious poet.
    [Show full text]
  • T. S. Eliot Collection
    T. S. Eliot Collection Books and Pamphlets (unless otherwise noted, the first listing after each Gallup number is a first edition) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in Poetry. A Magazine of Verse. Edited by Harriet Monroe. June 1915. Gallup C18. The first appearance of the poem. Near fine copy. A2 Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, Alfred A. Knopf, 1917 [i.e. 1918]. Good copy, a bit worn and faded. A4 Ara Vus Prec, The Ovid Press, 1920. Very good copy, light wear. Poems, Alfred A. Knopf, 1920 (first American edition), Head of spine chipped, otherwise very good. A5 The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Alfred A. Knopf, 1921 (American issue). Fine in chipped dust jacket. ----- Alfred A. Knopf, 1930 (American issue). Good, no dust jacket. The Waste Land in The Dial, Vol. LXXIII, Number 5, November 1922. Gallup C135. Published “almost simultaneously” in The Criterion. Extremities of spine chipped, otherwise a very good copy. A8 Poems: 1909-1925, Faber & Gwyer Ltd., 1925 (first edition, ordinary copies). Very good, no dust jacket. ----- Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1932 (first American edition). Good only, no dust jacket. Poems: 1909-1925. Faber & Faber, 1932. Reset edition. Fine in dust jacket. 1 T. S Eliot Collection A9 Journey of the Magi, Faber & Gwyer Ltd., 1927. Very good. ----- Faber & Gwyer Ltd., 1927 (limited copies). Fine copy. ----- William Edwin Rudge, 1927 (first American edition). Copyright issue, one of only 27 copies. Fine copy. A10 Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca, Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1927. Very good. A11 A Song for Simeon, Faber & Gwyer Ltd., 1928.
    [Show full text]
  • The Verse Dramas of TS Eliot
    University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 1959 Search for form| the verse dramas of T. S. Eliot Carol Sue Rometch The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Rometch, Carol Sue, "Search for form| the verse dramas of T. S. Eliot" (1959). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 3500. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/3500 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE SEARCH FOR FORM; THE VERSE DRAMAS OF T.S. ELIOT by CAROL SUE ROMETCH B.A. Whitman College, 1957 Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts MONTANA STATE UNIVERSITY 1959 Approved by; GhfiHrman, Boàrd of Examiners Dean, Graduate School WAY 2 8 1959 Date UMI Number: EP35735 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ütaMitatton PlAMiing UMI EP35735 Published by ProQuest LLC (2012). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
    [Show full text]
  • Copyrighted Material
    Part I Infl uences COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL 1 The Poet and the Pressure Chamber: Eliot ’ s Life Anthony Cuda Over the course of his long career, T. S. Eliot preferred to think about poetry not as the communication of ideas but as a means of emotional relief for the artist, a momen- tary release of psychological pressure, a balm for the agitated imagination. In 1919, he called poetic composition an “ escape from emotion ” ; in 1953, a “ relief from acute discomfort ” ( SE 10; OPP 98). At fi rst, poetry alleviated for him the mundane pressures of a bank clerk who lived hand - to - mouth, caring for his sick wife during the day and writing for the Times Literary Supplement at night; later, it lightened the spiritual pres- sures of a holy man in a desert of solitude with the devils conniving at his back. Most frequently, though, it eased the pressure of an artist doubting his talent, an acclaimed poet who wrote more criticism than poetry, ever fearful that the fi ckle Muse had permanently left him. The most intensely creative stages of Eliot’ s life often coincided with the periods in which he faced the most intense personal disturbances and upheavals. But where do we, as students of Eliot, begin to account for that pressure? “ The pressure, ” as he himself called it, “ under which the fusion takes place ” and from which the work of art emerges ( SE 8)? We could begin with the bare facts. Eliot was the youngest of seven children, born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri.
    [Show full text]
  • Unit-42 Modern British Poetry an Introduction
    This course material is designed and developed by Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), New Delhi. OSOU has been permitted to use the material. Master of Arts ENGLISH (MAEG) MEG-02 BRITISH DRAMA Block – 7 Murder in the Cathedral UNIT-1 T.S. ELIOT’S ESSAYS AND OTHER WORKS RELATED TO THE PLAY UNIT-2 BACKGROUND, PRODUCTION AND PERFORMANCE HISTORY UNIT-3 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE PLAY PART-I UNIT-4 CRITICAL APPROACHES TO THE PLAY PART-II UNIT-5 GENERAL COMMENTS AND OTHER READINGS UNIT 1 T.S. ELIOT’S ESSAYS AND OTHER WORKS RELATED TO THE PLAY Structure 1.0 Objectives 1.1 Introduction: Life and Works of T.S. Eliot 1.2 Dramatic Experiments : Sweeney Agonistes and The Rock 1.3 Eliot‘s essays relevant to his plays 1.4 Eliot‘s Poetic dramas 1.5 Exercises 1.0 OBJECTIVES This Unit will familiarise you with T.S. Eliot‘s: a. Life and works b. Dramatic experiments : Sweeney Agonistes and The Rock c. Essays relevant to his plays; and his d. Poetic dramas 1.1 INTRODUCTION : LIFE AND WORKS OF T.S. ELIOT Thomas Steams Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on 26th September, 1888. William Green Leaf Eliot (Eliot‘s grandfather from his father‘s side) was one of the earliest Eliot settlers in St. Louis. He was a Unitarian minister. Unitarianism arose in America in the mid eighteenth century as a wave against Puritanism and its beliefs in man‘s innate goodness and the doctrine of damnation. Unitarianism perceived God as kind. In 1834 William Green Leaf Eliot established a Unitarian church in St.Louis.
    [Show full text]
  • Simply Eliot
    Simply Eliot Simply Eliot JOSEPH MADDREY SIMPLY CHARLY NEW YORK Copyright © 2018 by Joseph Maddrey Cover Illustration by José Ramos Cover Design by Scarlett Rugers All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below. [email protected] ISBN: 978-1-943657-25-4 Brought to you by http://simplycharly.com Extracts taken from The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume 1, The Complete Poems and Plays, The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, On Poetry and Poets, and To Criticize the Critic, Copyright T. S. Eliot / Set Copyrights Limited and Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Extracts taken from Ash Wednesday, East Coker and Little Gidding, Copyright T. S. Eliot / Set Copyrights Ltd., first appeared in The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume 1. Reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Excerpts from Ash Wednesday, East Coker and Little Gidding, from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright 1936 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1964 by Thomas Stearns Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Extracts taken from Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman, Copyright T.
    [Show full text]
  • TS Eliot a Review of the Life and Poetry of the Ground-Breaking Modernist Poet 1
    IMPACT: International Journal of Research in Humanities, Arts and Literature (IMPACT: IJRHAL) ISSN (P): 2347-4564; ISSN (E): 2321-8878 Vol. 6, Issue 6, Jun 2018, 459-468 © Impact Journals T.S. ELIOT: A REVIEW OF THE LIFE AND POETRY OF THE GROUND-BREAKING MODERNIST POET Abdul Rashid Dar Taught as an Assistant Professor, Department of English (Contractual), Central University of Kashmir, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India Received: 13 Jun 2018 Accepted: 18 Jun 2018 Published: 23 Jun 2018 ABSTRACT Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965), was an American who made England his home and left behind him a wealth of influential literary works in prose, poetry, and drama. He came under the sway of contemporary European trends of art and literature and became one of the influential leaders of the modernist movement in poetry. He was a profound scholar and thinker, a product of diverse influences- literary, anthropological and philosophical. The literary influences of Elizabethan dramatists, English metaphysical, French symbolists and imagists are paramount in his poetry. As he had deeply studied the French imagist and symbolist poets, he gave imagism a dialect as well as a symbolist dimension and a tone of intellectual irony. His poetry marks a complete break from the nineteenth-century tradition. Reacting against subjectivism of romantic theory, he advocated his famous theory of impersonality of poetry. He demanded an objective authority of art and appreciated the order and completeness of classical poetry, the qualities which he tried to achieve in his own practice as a poet. His philosophy grew from continuous meditation through which he blossomed into a spiritualist.
    [Show full text]
  • Funny PARTY (Continued)
    NEWSLETTER Vol. 17. No.2 tactics Winter 2009/2010 The ACTORS COMPANY THEATRE Scott Alan Evans, Cynthia Harris & Simon Jones, Co-Artistic Directors What’S T.S. Eliot and his INSIDE: TSE's FUNNY PARTY (continued) ..................2 Funny Party (homas) S(terns) Eliot and the the- T.S. Eliot was born September 26, 1888 in SPRING GALA ater? Sure, there was the huge run- St. Louis, Missouri. His love of literature Save the Date .............3 Taway success of Cats, but beyond and learning began at Harvard, where that, what does the brilliant mind behind he graduated with an A.B. in English TACT Season Recap ..................... 4-5 The Waste Land have to do with theater? Literature in 1909. He became Surprisingly, few people are even aware the secretary for the Harvard TACT/QC Alliance.......5 that T.S. Eliot wrote a single play, let alone Advocate, a literary magazine six of them (and the fragment of a sev- and fell in love with writing FAVE FIVE enth). For those who are aware of Eliot’s poetry. Following Harvard, with Jack Koenig ........6 dramatic work, the play that comes to he studied in Paris at the PA PROGRAM mind most frequently is Murder in the Sorbonne for a year where, What We Did Last Cathedral. While that play is not without after attending lectures by Summer ......................6 its considerable merits, it is rather somber philosopher Henri Bergson, and bears little resemblance to his later Eliot decided to pursue an- MORE BANG for more effervescent work. Eliot’s plays have other degree from Harvard, YOUR BUCKS! ...........7 certainly been overshadowed by his po- this time in philosophy.
    [Show full text]
  • TS Eliot's ' Vita Nuova'
    T. S. Eliot's ' Vita Nuova' and 'Mi-Chemin': 'The Sensus Historiáis' D. J. LAKE . s. ELIOT'S last play, The Elder Statesman, is dedicated to his second wife in a short poem which concludes : T The words mean what they say, but some have a further meaning For you and me only. This is ambiguous; but whether it refers to the words of the dedication, or of the play which follows, it is an explicit admission that some of Eliot's published work contains private as well as public meanings. It will be the purpose of this article to explore some of the 'private' but publicly available references in Eliot's poems and plays, and to show how these help to increase our understanding of his whole poetic corpus. In pursuance of this aim it is necessary to draw conclusions as to some significant events in the poet's life. Biographical gossip about authors living or dead is always to be deplored; but some• times a general outline of developments is necessary even for literary appreciation. In this respect, Eliot is an extreme case. Far from being a 'shred of platinum', he is one of the most personal of writers; moreover, his Collected Poems constitute a single edifice, comparable to George Herbert's The Temple; and his life is the ground-plan of the building. But the outline to be suggested is not intended as literal biography: the 'events' in it may be purely symbolic representations of spiritual crises. A number of congruent patterns appear in the works, which make up a richer and more harmonious design when referred to apparently historical origins.
    [Show full text]
  • T.S. Eliot As a Critic
    B.A. Sem. – V Thomas Stearns Eliot Dr. Sagar Vyas Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) “I cannot think of a critic who has been more widely read and discussed in his own life-time; and not only in English, but in almost every language, except Russian.” - John Hayward T. S. Eliot Life • 1888: he was born in St. Louis, Missouri. • 1910: he studied in Paris at the Sorbonne. • 1915: he married the British ballet dancer Vivienne Haigh-Wood. • 1917: he established himself as an important avant-garde poet. Thomas Stearns Eliot. Only Connect ... New Directions T. S. Eliot Life • 1922: he edited The Criterion, an intellectual magazine. His professions included being a poet, a critic and an editor. • 1925: he became director for the publishers “Faber & Faber”. • 1927: he acquired British citizenship and converted to Thomas Stearns Eliot. Anglicanism. Only Connect ... New Directions T. S. Eliot Life • 1930: for the next thirty years he was considered as “the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world”. • 1948: he received the Nobel Prize for literature. • 1965: he died in London. Thomas Stearns Eliot. Only Connect ... New Directions T. S. Eliot Works Before the conversion 1917: Prufrock and other Observations. 1922: The Waste Land. It is said to be “the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century”. 1925: The Hollow Men. Cover for the first edition of Prufrock and other Observations Only Connect ... New Directions T. S. Eliot Works After the conversion 1927: Ariel Poems. 1930: Ash-Wednesday. 1935-1942: Four Quartets. 1935: Murder in the Cathedral.
    [Show full text]
  • Valerie Eliot: in Memoriam
    Time Present The Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society number 78 WINTER 2013 CONTENTS Valerie Eliot: In Memoriam Essays 1 he T. S. Eliot Society lost its foremost Honorary Member with the passing on 9 Conference Notes 4 TNovember of Valerie Esmé Eliot (1926–2012). A requiem mass was held for her in the Parish Church of St. Stephen, London, on 21 November, with a reading of “Journey Book Reviews 8 of the Magi” by Seamus Heaney, a eulogy by Craig Raine, and a choral singing of Igor Stravinsky’s setting of “The dove descending breaks the air” and George Herbert’s “King Pubic Sightings 10 of Glory, King of Peace, I will love thee,” both of which were sung at Eliot’s service there. As a Yorkshire teenager spellbound by John Gielgud’s reading of “Journey of the Abstracts 11 Magi,” Valerie determined upon graduation to make her way to T. S. Eliot: she eventually became his personal secretary at Faber in 1949, brought him much happiness after their Conferences and marriage in 1957, and became the steward of his papers upon his death in 1965. She Call for Papers 17 opened or attended the openings of numerous cultural events over the years, and her generous presence at the reception and dinner during the Eliot Society’s visit to London in Call for 2004 is remembered as a thrilling highlight by many our members. Nominations 18 The obituaries have invariably described her life mainly in terms of Eliot’s, but in the forty-seven years after his death she created an extraordinary life of her own as editor Board Report 18 of the facsimile edition of The Waste Land and three volumes of letters; as a director and sustaining supporter of the Faber firm; and as the executrix of his estate, which was Membership List 18 enriched by the worldwide success of Cats, thereby enabling her to become a major philanthropist for the nation, the arts, education, and numerous charities.
    [Show full text]