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Biography
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, T. S. Eliot was educated at
Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford. World War I prevented
his returning to Harvard to defend his thesis, and he settled
in London, where he worked as a teacher and in the foreign
department of Lloyds Bank while writing poetry and literary
essays in his free time. Eliot was championed by Ezra Pound,
who introduced him to literary circles, commented on his
drafts, and helped him with his finances. Although Eliot
had written traditional poetry as a student, after reading
about the French symbolist poets in Arthur Symons's The
Symbolist Movement in Literature, he reconceived his
style, composing poems like The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock and Preludes (both 1915), which are representative
of what is now called "high modernism." His early poetry,
such as The Waste Land (1922), critiques modern civilization
through a series of multiple voices and characters, literary
and historical allusions, fragments of myth and history,
and vignettes of contemporary life; his later work explores
the difficult process of searching for faith and reconciliation.
With the advent of World War II, Eliot distanced himself
from politics and, through essays such as Tradition and
the Individual Talent (1919, 1920), advanced an apolitical
approach to poetry: poems should be considered in relation
to other poems and in terms of their own structures. Eliot
also composed verse plays, including Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The
Cocktail Party (1949), and The Elder Statesman (1959),
and he founded Criterion, a little magazine that was
published from 1922 to 1939. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1948. His poems are collected in Collected
Poems, 1909-1962 (1963).
Explorations
Four Quartets (1943), of which Burnt Norton is
the opening poem, has received less attention from critics,
teachers, and students than has The Waste Land. The Four
Quartets poems present Eliot in a changed voice, and
the experience of reading and interpreting Burnt Norton is
also very different. With fewer clear allusions and literary
echoes to decode, and with no notes from Eliot to provide
guidance, we may have to read for long stretches without
a clear sense of where we are or what is going on. Growing
comfortable with this changed voice is important to understanding
and valuing Eliot as an artist and to comprehending where
he could go, spiritually and artistically, after the darkness
of The Waste Land.
1. Describe the sound and pace of the opening section
of Burnt Norton, and compare those qualities to
the meters and language used in section II. Why do you
suppose that the first stanza of section II is in tetrameter
with a rhyme scheme, while the stanzas before and after
forego rhyme and use a variety of line lengths? What might
those variations suggest about the tone of the poem's opening
and the psychological or spiritual content?
2. The word "time" appears over and over again in Burnt
Norton. How is time invoked or described at various
points in the poem? Is there an interesting progression
or change in these references? What lines strike you
as especially odd or mysterious? What is their effect,
singly or together?
3. Read the first ten lines of section V, and consider
them as a possible commentary on poetry -- and on this
poem in particular. What is suggested here about the importance
of "Words, after speech" or "the form, the pattern" that
can "reach / The stillness"? What inferences do you draw
from these lines about what Burnt Norton is attempting
to achieve?
Other sites to consult:
What
the Thunder Said: T. S. Eliot. An excellent
source of information on a well-designed site. Includes
a biographical timeline, links to an impressive number
of texts, and links to nearly all of the worthwhile
Eliot sites available. Created and maintained by
Raymond Camden.
The
Bartleby Archive T. S. Eliot. Three volumes
of poetry, one volume of prose, and a bibliography
on this comprehensive Columbia University site.
Eliot
reads "The Waste Land". Audio clips from
the HarperAudio archive.
"The
Waste Land" resources from reading. Professor
Mary Anne Andrade's site provides helpful inroads
to this difficult poem (Collin County Community College).
http://www.deathclock.com/thunder/: What the Thunder
Said, a T.S. Eliot Web site.
http://www.bartleby.com/people/Eliot-Th.html: A T. S. Eliot
site from Project Bartleby.
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=18: The Academy
of American Poets’ T. S. Eliot page.
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