T.S. ELIOT: Poet of modern sensibility

 

Introduction:

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26^th September 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, an inland industrial city of America. He came of a highly cultivated and renowned New England family. He was the son of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Chaincey Stearns. His father’s family came to Massachusetts in 1688 from East Coker. The poet’s mother came from Boston. She was a social worker, an ardent, direct devotee of woman’s rights, and a writer herself.

    Eliot was at the smith, Academy at St. Louis till 1905. He completed his preparation for college at Milton Academy in Massachusetts and then entered Harvard University in 1906. In the university he pursued philosophy as his major field of study. He started composing poems and contributed them to harwrad advocate, a student literary magazine which he edited. His early poems are portrait of a lady and the and the first two Preludes, (1909- 1910). He spent the years 1910-1911 at the Sorbonne, Paris where he studied French literature and philosophy. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Rhapsody on a windy night were written during a student year in Paris and Munich. He returned to America and between 1911-14 he pursued further graduate study at Harvard, in metaphysics logic, Psychology, Philosophy, Sanskrit and Pali.  In 1915 He married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. He settled in England. In 1916 he made his London debut not as a poet or as a literary critic, but as a reviewer of philosophic books.  His first collection of poems Pruforic and other observations was published in 1917. He wrote well known plays – Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family reunion (1939) The COCKTAIL Party (1950) The Confidental Clerk (1954) and the Elder Statesman (1959). He was awarded the Noble prize for literature and order of merit in 1948. He died in London on 4^th January, 1965.

ELIOT AS THE POET OF MODERN SENSIBILITY:

Eliot’s genius is that of great poet who has a profound and acute appreciation of the difficulties of age. His poetry bears the most important relevance to the interests of the modern man because Eliot was the first modern poet who not only gave expression to modern sensibility in English poetry, but also set up new trends and traditions which were adopted and developed by the poets who followed him. His poetry by b virtue of its new imagery, new poetic technique, new versification and new diction expresses the finest consciousness of the modern age. The modern consciousness has been defined by Stephen Spender as “a sensibility to contemporary phenomena like machinery, the industrial city and neurotic behaviour”. The topical and the intellectual, the lively and the difficult are superficial effects of modernist work and both these works of ‘modernist’ note find expression in the poetry of T.S. Eliot.

The conditions of modern life have altered our perceptions of rhythm of modern life. The colloquial flatness and overtones of sophisticated exhaustion are expressed by the various ways in which Eliot beats out his thoughts in wittily syncopated jazz rhythms in the Waste Land. These lines from the Waste Land

             At the violent hour when the eyes and back

           Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine wants

           Like a taxi throbbing waiting….

Are innovatory not because they mention a taxi, but the human component of urban city is deeply related to almost identified with what most intimately informs its daily activity, the rhythms of its life, in line, that subtly catch the essence of that rhythm, the unending monotony of pulsing machines.

Eliot expresses the chaos and disillusionment of modern life by his peculiar technique and the images of the metropolitan life. He presents a certain paltriness in contemporary man. No one can more readily call up the dreary associations of filth and fog common to all who know big-city life, and the further psychological associations of hopelessness and loneliness intertwined with them.

Eliot was both a modernist and traditionalist. He had his own generations in his bones, and the poets of the past in the background. But Eliot, modernist as he was, had behind him the majestic background of the literature of many ages, and had absorbed much of its spirit. He scorned outward images of and clichés though he could effectively borrow phrases from well-known poets, and in so doing in the new context, create an astonishing new effect. He was to be precise of their sound to his meaning.

Eliot introduced his contemporaries to their own generation. So much was that ‘in his bones’ that he was able to give to the language of poetry a new idiom which is that of our time, employing images which are fresh and vigorous, and a metrical form which discards the banality of the overfamiliar, the secondhand, the outworn. During the thirty years of continuous writing in which his work has shown developing power, his influence has been primarily among intellectuals, and especially the younger of them. His mind, for all his imagination, is highly intellectualized. The younger poets came under the spell and found in Eliot the inspiration they could not find anywhere else. He has done more than any other living English poet to make his age conscious of itself, and in being conscious, apprehensive.