Authors
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
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Eliot’s poetic works have been collected in Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (1963) and The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (1969). Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909– 1917 (1997), edited by Christopher Ricks, contains early, previously unpublished poetry. The indispensable manuscript to The Waste Land is in The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (1971), edited by Valerie Eliot. Michael North edited a Norton Critical Edition of The Waste Land (2001). Important critical writings include The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Poetry and Drama (1951), The Three Voices of Poetry (1953), On Poetry and Poets (1957), and To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (1965). Three volumes of social commentary are After Strange Gods (1934), The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), and Notes toward the Definition of Culture (1948). Valerie Eliot edited The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 1: 1898–1922 (1988). J. L. Dawson edited Concordance to the Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot (1995). Good biographies are Peter Ackroyd’s T. S. Eliot: A Life (1984) and Lyndall Gordon’s T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1998, 2000), an updating of her earlier biographies. Influential earlier studies of Eliot include F. O. Matthiessen’s The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (rev. 1947), Helen Gardner’s The Art of T. S. Eliot (1950), Hugh Kenner’s The Invisible Poet (1959), Northrop Frye’s T. S. Eliot (1963), and Stephen Spender’s T. S. Eliot (1976). Among numerous critical studies are Helen Gardner’s The Composition of Four Quartets (1978), Derek Traversi’s T. S. Eliot: The Longer Poems (1976), Louis Menand’s Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context (1987), Jewel Spears Brooker and Joseph Bentley’s Reading “The Waste Land”: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (1990), Brooker’s Mastery and Escape: T. S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994), A. David Moody’s Thomas Stearns Eliot, Poet (1994), Anthony Julius’s T. S. Eliot, Anti- Semitism, and Literary Form (1996), Ronald Schuchard’s Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art (2001), and David Chintz’s T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003). Moody also edited the useful Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot (1994). For collections of critical essays about Eliot, see T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Criticism (1974), edited by Linda W. Wagner (1974); T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History (1991), edited by Ronald Bush (1991); T. S. Eliot, A Voice Descanting: Centenary Essays (1990), edited by Shyamal Bagchee, and Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot (2004), edited by Cassandra Laity and Nancy K. Gish. Gareth Reeves’s T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1994) is a comprehensive introduction to the poem. Donald C. Gallup compiled the standard bibliography, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (rev. 1969).
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).
Questions for Discussion and Writing
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?
