T. S.

ELIOT
1. Biography:
Thomas Stearns Eliot was an essayist, publisher, playwright, literary and social critic, and "one
of the twentieth century's major poets". Born on 26 September 1888,in St. Louis, Missouri, in the
United States, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family. Thomas Eliot's paternal grandfather had
moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. His father was a
successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St
Louis. His mother wrote poetry and was a social worker, a new profession in the early 20th
century.
Eliot's childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors. Firstly, he had to
overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he
could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socializing with his
peers. As he was often isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the
young boy immediately became obsessed with books and was absorbed in tales depicting
savages, the Wild West, or Mark Twain's thrill-seeking Tom Sawyer. Secondly, Eliot credited his
hometown with fuelling his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply
than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's
childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider
myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London." From
1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy. His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters",
was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February
1905.
Following graduation, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year,
where he met Scofield Thayer who later published The Waste Land. He studied philosophy
at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning his bachelor's degree after three years, instead of
the usual four.
After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris where,
from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.
From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. Eliot was
awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. He first visited Marburg, Germany,
where he planned to take a summer programme, but when the First World War broke out he went
to Oxford instead.
In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote, "I am very dependent upon
women (I mean female society)." Less than four months later, Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivienne
Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess. They were married on 26 June 1915. After a short visit
alone to his family in the United States, Eliot returned to London and took several teaching jobs,
such as lecturing at Birkbeck College, University of London. The philosopher Bertrand
Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars have
suggested that she and Russell had an affair, but the allegations were never confirmed. The
marriage was markedly unhappy, in part because of Vivienne's health issues. This, coupled with
apparent mental instability, meant that she was often sent away by Eliot and her doctors for
extended periods of time in the hope of improving her health, and as time went on, he became
increasingly detached from her. The couple formally separated in 1933.
After that Eliot was with different women till 1957, when on 10 January, at the age of 68, Eliot
married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher
well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August 1949.
He had no children with either of his wives. Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in
London, on 4 January 1965.
2. Poetry:
For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small number of poems. He was aware of this
even early in his career. Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small
books or pamphlets, and then collected them in books. As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the
English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century (most notably John Donne) and the
nineteenth century French symbolist poets (including Baudelaire and Laforgue) into radical
innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the
disillusionment of a younger post–World War I generation with the values and conventions—both
literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on
contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in
the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism.
The major symbols in Eliot`s poems are: the waste land, water, city, stairs, journey.

The major themes: time, death, rebirth, love and the use of the on psychological,
metaphysical and aesthetic levels.

In 1922 Eliot published “the longest poem in English language”, one of the greatest achievements of
the modernist movement, The Waste Land.

3. Works:
Prose

 "The Birds of Prey" (a short story; 1905)

 "The Wine and the Puritans" (review, 1909)
 "The Point of View" (1909)
 "
Poems

 "A Fable for Feasters" (1905)

 "Song: 'If space and time, as sages say'" (1907)
 "Before Morning" (1908)
 "On a Portrait" (1909)
 "Spleen" (1910)
 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
 The Waste Land (1922)
 The Hollow Men (1925)
 Four Quartets (1943)
 Test
1. T.S. Eliot's full name is what?
A. Tom Stevens
B. Toran Samuel
C. Thomas Stearns
D. Terrence Soran

2. Eliot was born when?

A. Aug. 26, 1898
B. Nov. 13, 1888
C. June 20, 1889
D. Sep. 26, 1888

3. Eliot began school at what prep school?

A. Smith Academy
B. Washington Academy
C. Becky Academy
D. The Andrea School for The Blind

4. Eliot divorces his wife.

A. True
B. False

5. Eliot re-marries in 1957 to Valerie Fletcher who was how many years younger?
A. 30
B. 22
C. 38
D. 40

6. Which of the following themes is not major for Eliot`s poems?

A. rebirth
B. suffering of the villager
C. the use of ………….. on metaphysical levels
D. the mother`s oath

7. Which Eliot`s poem was called “the longest poem in English language”
A “A Fable for Feasters”
B “The Hollow Men”
C “The Waste Land”
D “Four Quartets

8. When did Eliot die?

A. 1 January 1960
B. 4 January 1965
C. 24 July 1970
D. 4 November 1965
 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is the first professionally
published poem by American-born, British poet T. S. Eliot, who began writing "Prufrock" in February
1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. It was later
printed as part of a twelve-poem pamphlet titled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. At the
time of its publication, Prufrock was considered outlandish, but is now seen as heralding a
paradigmatic cultural shift from late 19th-century Romantic verse and Georgian lyrics to Modernism.
Title:
In his early drafts, Eliot gave the poem the subtitle "Prufrock among the Women." [11]:41 This subtitle
was apparently discarded before publication. Eliot called the poem a "love song" in reference to
Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Love Song of Har Dyal," first published in Kipling's collection Plain
Tales from the Hills (1888).

Summary:
It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man—overeducated, eloquent,
neurotic, and emotionally stilted. Prufrock, the poem’s speaker, seems to be addressing a potential
lover, with whom he would like to “force the moment to its crisis” by somehow consummating their
relationship. But Prufrock knows too much of life to “dare” an approach to the woman: In his mind he
hears the comments others make about his inadequacies, and he chides himself for “presuming”
emotional interaction could be possible at all. The poem moves from a series of fairly concrete (for
Eliot) physical settings—a cityscape (the famous “patient etherised upon a table”) and several
interiors (women’s arms in the lamplight, coffee spoons, fireplaces)—to a series of vague ocean
images conveying Prufrock’s emotional distance from the world as he comes to recognize his
second-rate status (“I am not Prince Hamlet’). “Prufrock” is powerful for its range of intellectual
reference and also for the vividness of character achieved.

Themes and interpretation

Because the poem is concerned primarily with the irregular musings of the narrator, it can be difficult
to interpret. Laurence Perrine wrote, "[the poem] presents the apparently random thoughts going
through a person's head within a certain time interval, in which the transitional links are psychological
rather than logical".This stylistic choice makes it difficult to determine exactly what is literal and what
is symbolic. On the surface, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" relays the thoughts of a sexually
frustrated middle-aged man who wants to say something but is afraid to do so, and ultimately does
not.
In the first half of the poem, Prufrock uses various outdoor images (the sky, streets, cheap
restaurants and hotels, fog), and talks about how there will be time for various things before "the
taking of a toast and tea", and "time to turn back and descend the stair." This has led many to believe
that Prufrock is on his way to an afternoon tea, where he is preparing to ask this "overwhelming
question". Others, however, believe that Prufrock is not physically going anywhere, but rather, is
playing through it in his mind.

Themes:
- Procrastination =>He takes a really long time to ask her the question
- Insecurity =>He doesn't think he is good enough like the statue of David. He is old, but trying to
seem cool through his appearance
- Passing time =>Time passes as he is waiting to ask the question, He is aging
Epigraph:
In context, the epigraph refers to a meeting between Dante and Guido da Montefeltro.

Test

1. Who is the speaker in the epigraph?

A. GUIDO DA MONTEFELTRO
B. MICHELANGELO
C. DANTE
D. RUFROCK

2. Who is the listener in the epigraph?

A. GUIDO DA MONTEFELTRO
B. PRUFROCK
C. MICHELANGELO
D. DANTE
3. What was the original title of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?
A. "WHAT DO PRUFROCKS WANT?"
B. "PRUFROCK AND THE WOMEN"
C. "THE LOVE SONG OF JOHANNES A. PRUFROCK"
D. "PRUFROCK AMONG THE WOMEN"

4. Which are the main themes in the poem?

1) Procrastination
2) Insecurity
3) Passing time

5. What do the last six lines of the poem resemble?

A. THE CONCLUDING SESTET OF A PETRARCHAN SONNET
B. THE CONCLUDING SESTET OF A SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET
C. THE BEGINNING SESTET OF A SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET
D. THE BEGINNINGS SESTET OF A PETRARCHAN SONNET