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T. S. Eliot |
T.S. Eliot went to Paris in 1910 and, at the age of twenty-two, wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “Preludes”, “Portrait of a Lady”, and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night” the poems that would launch his reputation a he ps the leading poet of the age. With the help of Ezra Pound, he published his first book in 1917. He married, worked as a bank clerk in England, and wrote reviews of the other avant-garde poets.
Then in 1922, he published The Waste Land, a long, often obscure poem that became the exemplar of the new Modernism. Written while hospitalized for a nervous breakdown in 1921, it was a poem of profound disappointment. Looking back on the ashes of the Victorian era, the poet bemoaned the dispassionate materialism that had overtaken Europe and wondered if one might find salvation in the ancient patterns of Dante, the grail myth, or The Golden Bough. Eliot’s grim view never changed.
Over the next twenty years, he wrote more than 600 articles on literature and aesthetics. He became a senior executive at a London publishing house, and in 1943 published the “Four Quartets,” his last major poem. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |