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. In his pursuit of giving a realistic representation in his poetry to life around him, he many a time becomes critical of the spiritual degeneration and expresses his despair over the utter hollowness of the contemporary civilization. By producing the poetic masterpieces like The Waste Land, The Hollow Men and Four Quartets, he inspired a young generation of English poets who appeared on the English literary scene in the years following the First World War. KEYWORDS : Modernist Poetry, Philosophy, Symbolism, Imagism, Subjectivism, Impersonality INTRODUCTION T.S.Eliot’s Life (1888-1965) Thomas Stearns Eliot, a major figure in English literature from the early 1920s until his death in 1965 whose influence has been immense on English poetry, was born to industrialist and philanthropist Henry Ware Eliot (1843-1919) and Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot (1843-1929), a school teacher, poet, and social work volunteer at the Humanity Club by St. Louis, on 26 th September 1888 at St. Louis in Missouri state of the U.S.A. The prosperous couple had seven children-five daughters and two sons. Their first son, Theodora Sterling Eliot died in infancy. T.S. Eliot was the seventh or the youngest of them. Hisancestors had lived in America for the last couple of centuries since Andrew Elliott, a Calvinist had left East Coker, a village in Somersetshire, England and emigrated in 1667 to settle in a colony of New England on the east coast of North America. In 1834, T.S. Eliot’s reverend grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot (1811-1887), a leading philanthropist of his time, civic leader and educator, moved from Boston to St. Louis, and established the first Unitarian church there west of the Mississippi River and also co-founded Washington University in St. Louis in 1853, Impact Factor(JCC): 3.7985 - This article can be downloaded from www.impactjournals.us 460 Abdul Rashid Dar donated funds for its construction and served as its chancellor from 1870 till his death in 1887. T.S. Eliot’s father, Henry Ware Eliot, a graduate of Washington University first worked as an employee of Reed and Green, a wholesale grocery business, then a partner in Eliot and Larkin, a firm of manufacturing chemists. From 1877 to 1919, Henry Eliot was on the Board of Directors of Washington University and in 1902 he also served as the President of the Academy of Science of St. Louis. In addition to this, he was also a successful businessman and served as the president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis. The family background had an important role in shaping T.S. Eliot’s poetic sensibility. His renowned paternal grandfather and his mother, an accomplished lady by most standards contributed a lot to his development as a writer, especially as a religious poet. In 1898, T.S. Eliot, the American-born future British poet, playwright, critic, author and editor was sent to Smith Academy, originally named Eliot Academy, a Boys’ school founded in 1854 by his notable paternal grandfather William Greenleaf Eliot, founder and chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis. At Smith Academy in St. Louis, Missouri, where he studied till 1905 until he was sixteen, he was considered a brilliant student in his studies which included, among other subjects, Ancient Greek, Latin, French and German and in 1900 he earned a distinction by winning a gold medal for his Latin. As he was afflicted with a congenital double hernia, he was in the constant eye of his mother and five older sisters and at home spent most of his time reading the stories. As a schoolboy, he took great interest in Mark Twain’s 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . He inherited his mother’s literary skill and was infatuated with literature from his early childhood, writing his first poetry at the age of fourteen. In addition to receiving a classical education at Smith Academy and privately with St. Louis, Eliot had his favorite writers at school like G.G. Byron, P.B. Shelly, Conan Doyle, A.C. Swinburne, D.G. Rossetti, Edgar Allan Poe and R.L. Stevenson. In 1905, Eliot graduated from school and in preparation for admission to the prestigious Harvard College, the undergraduate arts college of Harvard University; he went to Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a year. In 1906, at the age of seventeen, he went to Harvard College for the study of philosophy. From 1906-1910, he was at Harvard, where he pursued a wide-ranging course of studies in language and literature; the classics and German, French and English literatures. During his years at Harvard, he was greatly influenced by two of his teachers, George Santayana(1863-1952), the Spanish-American philosopher, novelist, essayist and poet and Irving Babbitt(1865-1933), American literary critic and professor of French and comparative literature. At Harvard, he continued writing and made a good impression by contributing regularly to The Harvard Advocate , Harvard College’s undergraduate journal of fiction, poetry, art and criticism. In December 1908, he found the Arthur Symons’s book The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1895) in the Harvard Union library- a collection of books housed in the old Harvard Union. This recent book of literary criticism offered him an introduction to avant-garde French poetry. This book changed his life as it introduced him to the French poets of the nineteenth century especially to the poetry of symbolist-impressionist poet Jules Laforgue (1860-1887), the sophisticated master of lyrical irony and one of the inventors of the free verse( French: vers libre), whose combination of ironic elegance and psychological nuance gave his juvenile literary efforts a voice, Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), the French poet famous for his contributions to Symbolism and Paul-Marie Verlaine (1844-1896), the poet associated with Decadent Movement. Reading Jules Laforgue turned out to be the catalyst for T.S. Eliot’s growth into a genuine poet as the technical ability of Laforgue fascinated him. The typical Laforgian device which Eliot copies is to speak with two voices, one serious, and sentimental, other derisive and flippant. NAAS Rating: 3.10- Articles can be sent to [email protected] T.S. Eliot : A Review of the Life and Poetry 461 of the Ground-breaking Modernist Poet At Harvard, Eliot covered his four-year undergraduate course only in three years and received his Bachelor of Arts Degree in comparative literature in 1909 and M.A. Degree in English literature in his fourth year in 1910. It was at Harvard that Eliot, for the first time, read some works of the renowned French poet Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821-1867), with whom he discovered poetical possibilities that he had not found in any of the English poets. By 1909-1910, Eliot’s adoption of poetic vocation had been confirmed. Prompted by his deep interest in the French symbolists, Eliot went to France soon after getting his M. A. Degree in 1910 and spent a year at the Sorbonne University in Paris to study French literature and philosophy. There he came under the influence of the renowned French philosopher of the school of continental philosophy, Henri-Louis Bergson (1869-1941) whose lectures he attended in Paris for enhancing his knowledge of philosophy. In 1911, Eliot returned to Harvard and registered himself as a graduate student in philosophy as he intended to pursue philosophy as an academic career, and studied Indian philosophy, Sanskrit literature and Pali. The Bhagvad Gita was one of the Indian classical texts that he studied with much interest. He also learnt about Buddhism, the influence of which remained with him for many years. In 1913, he was elected the President of the Harvard Philosophical Club and the very next year he was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford. In 1914, at the age of twenty-five, Eliot went to Germany to spend the early summer of the year at a seminar in Marburg, Germany, with plans to study in the autumn at Merton College, Oxford but the impending world war quickened his departure from there.