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Unit 31: Hughes and T.S. Eliot

poet Ezra Pound, the other tower of Modernist poetry. During Eliot’s recuperation from his Notes
breakdown in a Swiss sanitarium, he wrote “The Waste Land,” arguably the most influential English-
languge poem ever written.
Eliot was now the voice of Modernism, and in London he expanded the breadth of his writing. In
addition to writing poetry and editing it for various publications (he also founded the quarterly
Criterion in 1922, editing it until its end in 1939), he wrote philosophical reviews and a number of
critical essays. Many of these, such as “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” have become classics,
smartly and affectionately dissecting other poets while subliminally informing us about Eliot’s own
work. Eliot declared his preference for poetry that does away with the poet’s own personality and
poetry that uses the “objective correlative” of symbolic, meaningful, and often chaotic concrete
imagery.
Eliot joined the Church of England in 1927, and his work afterward reflects his Anglican attitudes.
The six-part poem “Ash Wednesday” (1930) and other religious works in the early part of the 1930s,
while stellar in their own right, retrospectively feel like a warm-up for his epic “Four Quartets”
(completed and published together in 1943). Eliot used his wit, philosophical preoccupation with
time, and vocal range to examine further religious issues.

Write the biography of T.S. Eliot.

Eliot continued his Renaissance man ways by writing his first play, “Murder in the Cathedral,” in
1935. A verse drama about the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket, the play’s religious themes
were forerunners of Eliot’s four other major plays, “The Family Reunion” (1939), “The Cocktail
Party” (1949), “The Confidential Clerk” (1953), and “The Elder Statesman” (1959). Religious verse
dramas cloaked in secular conversational comedy, Eliot belied whatever pretensions his detractors
may have found in his Anglophilia. He leapt ahead with this anti-pretension with “Old Possum’s
Book of Practical Cats” (1939), a book of verse for children that was eventually adapted into the
Broadway musical “Cats.”
As one might expect from his work, Eliot was unhappy for most of his life, but his second marriage
in 1957 proved fruitful. When he died in 1965, he was the recipient of a Nobel Prize (1948), the
author of the century’s most influential poem, and arguably the century’s most important poet.
Perhaps due to the large shadow he casts, relatively few poets have tried to ape his style; others
simply find him cold. Still, no one can escape the authority of Eliot’s Modernism—it is as relevant
today as it was in 1922. While Eliot may not have as much influence on poets today as some of his
contemporaries, he has had a far greater impact on poetry.

31.3.2 Introduction to the Text

“The Waste Land” caused a sensation when it was published in 1922. It is today the most widely
translated and studied English-language poem of the twentieth century. This is perhaps surprising
given the poem’s length and its difficulty, but Eliot’s vision of modern life as plagued by sordid
impulses, widespread apathy, and pervasive soullessness packed a punch when readers first
encountered it.
Text
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

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