T. S. Eliot
Biography
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri on
September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of
his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States
for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and
having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a
year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy,
but returned to Europe and settled in England in 1914. The following year,
he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a
teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.
It was in London that Eliot came under the
influence of his contemporary Ezra
Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the
publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of
poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and
immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the
publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be
the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's
reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by 1930, and for the
next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary
criticism in the English-speaking world.
As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the
English metaphysical poets of the 17th century (most notably
John Donne) and the 19th 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. His major
later poems include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets
(1943); his books of literary and social criticism include The Sacred
Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933),
After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of
Culture (1940). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse
dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion,
and The Cocktail Party.
He became a British citizen in 1927; long
associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he published many
younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a
notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in
1933, and was remarried, to Valerie Fletcher, in 1956. T. S. Eliot received
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and died in London in 1965.
A Selected Bibliography
Poetry
Ash Wednesday (1930)
Burnt Norton (1941)
Collected Poems (1962)
East Coker (1940)
Four Quartets (1943)
Poems (1919)
Poems, 1909-1925 (1925)
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
The Complete Poems and Plays (1952)
The Dry Salvages (1941)
The Waste Land (1922)
Prose
After Strange Gods (1933)
Andrew Marvell (1922)
Dante (1929)
Elizabethan Essays (1934)
Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)
For Lancelot Andrews (1928)
John Dryden (1932)
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1949)
Poetry and Drama (1951)
Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern (1954)
The Classics and The Man of Letters (1942)
The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)
The Sacred Wood (1920)
The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
Thoughts After Lambeth (1931)
Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature (1929)
Drama
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
Sweeney Agonistes (1932)
The Cocktail Party (1950)
The Confidential Clerk (1953)
The Elder Statesman (1958)
The Family Reunion (1939)
The Rock (1934)
تعداد دیگری از اشعار
تی.اس.الیوت را در
بخش ترجمه شعر جهان بخوانید.
