Eliot Found In The Harvard Union English Literature Essay
T.S. Eliot is a celebrated poet, literary author, editor, and critic who was born in 1888 in St. Louis Missouri. He was best known for his verse forms more so than any of his other places. He was widely renowned during his life, but it seems that shortly after his decease his repute greatly declined.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, or more normally known as merely T.S. Eliot, was born in St. Louis Missouri on September 26, 1888, to Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champ Stearns. His male parent, Henry Ware Eliot, was the president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, and his female parent, Charlotte Champ Stearns, was a former instructor, a societal work voluntary at the Humanity Club of St. Louis, and an recreational poet who was drawn to Emerson. Thomas was the youngest of seven kids and was born after his parents were financially able, after his male parent had recovered from his earlier concern failure. His siblings were besides half manner at that place to being grownups by the clip he was born. Thomas was diagnosed with a inborn dual hernia, which required him to have on a hernia truss, which is a support garment that is used to forestall a hernia from enlarging. Because of his hernia he was in changeless supervising of his female parent and five older sisters.
It could easy be said that Eliot traveling to Harvard was already set in gesture before he was born. His paternal gramps, William Greenleaf Eliot, was a pupil of William Ellery Channing who was the dean of American Unitarianism. William Eliot graduated from Harvard Divinity School, and so founded the first Unitarian church in Boston. Because of his gramps ‘s connexions to Harvard, and his parent ‘s guarding their connexion to Boston ‘s Unitarian society, it seems that Eliot had no other pick but to travel to Harvard. One of the ways his parents kept their connexion to the Unitarian society was by sing the north shore every summer. When he was immature Eliot went looking for pediculosis pubis and even became a crewman while he and his household were in Massachusetts. Later on in his life he said that he gave up a sense of belonging to either part, and that he ever felt like a New Englander in the Southwest, and a South westerner in New England.
Regardless of his feeling of non belonging from both of the countries he called place, Eliot impressed many of his schoolmates with how easy it was for him to socially when he began to analyze at Harvard in the autumn of 1906. Just like his brother Henry, who had besides gone to Harvard, Eliot lived in a high category private residence hall in a affluent vicinity during his first-year twelvemonth. He joined a batch of nines, which includes the literary Signet. Among all of his instructors, Eliot was attracted to the strength of Irving Babbitt and the fashionable incredulity of George Santayana. Both of these people helped reenforce his disfavor for the “ progressive, progressive university ” created by Eliot ‘s cousin. However, his attitude did non forestall him from taking advantage of the elected system that his cousin had introduced. As a fresher, his chosen classs were so assorted that he shortly wound up on academic probation.
In December 1908 a book Eliot found in the Harvard Union library changed his life: Arthur Symons’sA ” The Symbolist Movement in Literature ” introduced him to the poesy of Jules Laforgue, and Laforgue ‘s combination of dry elegance and psychological nicety gave his juvenile literary attempts a voice. By 1909-1910 his poetic career had been confirmed: he joined the board and was briefly secretary of Harvard ‘s literary magazine, theA Advocate, A and he could urge to his schoolmate William Tinckom-Fernandez the last word in Gallic edification — the Vers Libre of Paul Fort and Francis Jammes. On theA ” Advocate ” , Eliot started a womb-to-tomb friendly relationship with Conrad Aiken.
In May 1910 a suspected instance of vermilion febrility about prevented Eliot ‘s graduation. By autumn, though, he was good plenty to set about a postgraduate twelvemonth in Paris. He lived at 151 Bi rue St. Jacques, near to the Sorbonne, and struck up a warm friendly relationship with a fellow boarder, Jean Verdenal, a medical pupil who subsequently died in the conflict of the Dardenelles and to whom Eliot dedicated “ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. ” With Verdenal, he entered the rational life of France so twirling, Eliot subsequently recalled, around the figures of Emile Durkheim, Paul Janet, Remy de Gourmont, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Bergson. Eliot attended Bergson ‘s talks at the College de France and was temporarily converted to Bergson ‘s philosophical involvement in the progressive development of consciousness. In a mode feature of a life-time of conflicting attitudes, though, Eliot besides gravitated toward the politically conservative, neoclassical, and Catholic authorship of Charles Maurras. Waring antonyms, these enthusiasms worked together to further a professional involvement in doctrine and propelled Eliot back to a doctorial plan at Harvard the following twelvemonth.
In 1910 and 1911 Eliot copied into a leather notebook the verse form that would set up his repute: “ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, ” “ Portrait of a Lady, ” “ La Figlia Che Piange, ” “ Preludes, ” and “ Rhapsody on a Windy Night. ” Uniting some of the hardiness of Robert Browning ‘s soliloquies with the incantatory elegance of symbolist poetry, and packing Laforgue ‘s poesy of disaffection with the moral seriousness of what Eliot one time called “ Boston uncertainty, ” these verse forms explore the nuances of the unconscious with a acerb humor. Their consequence was both alone and compelling, and their confidence staggered his coevalss who were privileged to read them in manuscript. Aiken, for illustration, marveled at “ how crisp and complete and sui generis the whole thing was, from the beginning. TheA wholenessA is at that place, from the really get downing. ”
In the autumn of 1911, though, Eliot was as preoccupied with thoughts as with literature. A pupil in what has been called the aureate age of Harvard doctrine, he worked amid a group that included Santayana, William James, the sing Bertrand Russell, and Josiah Royce. Under Royce ‘s way, Eliot wrote a thesis on Bergson ‘s neo-idealist critic F. H. Bradley and produced a seeking philosophical review of the psychological science of consciousness. He besides deepened his reading in anthropology and faith, and took about as many classs in Sanskrit and Hindu thought as he did in doctrine. By 1914, when he left on a going family to Europe, he had persuaded a figure of Harvard ‘s philosophers to see him as a possible co-worker.
Eliot spent the early summer of 1914 at a seminar in Marburg, Germany, with programs to analyze in the autumn at Merton College, Oxford, with Harold Joachim, Bradley ‘s co-worker and replacement. The at hand war quickened his going. In August he was in London with Aiken and by September Aiken had shown Eliot ‘s manuscript poems to Pound, who, non easy impressed, was won over. Pound called on Eliot in late September and wrote to Harriet Monroe atA PoetryA magazine that Eliot had “ really trained himself and modernized himselfA on his ain. “ A The two initiated a coaction that would alter Anglo-American poesy, but non before Eliot put down deep English roots.
In early spring 1915 Eliot ‘s old Milton Academy and Harvard friend Scofield Thayer, subsequently editor of theA DialA and so besides at Oxford, introduced Eliot to Vivien Haigh-Wood, a terpsichorean and a friend of Thayer ‘s sister. Eliot was drawn immediately to Vivien ‘s bluntness, and charmed by her household ‘s Hampstead gloss. Abandoning his accustomed vacillation with adult females, in June 1915 he married Vivien on urge at the Hampstead Registry Office. His parents were shocked, and so, when they learned of Vivien ‘s history of emotional and physical jobs, deeply disturbed. The matrimony about caused a household interruption, but it besides indelibly marked the beginning of Eliot ‘s English life. Vivien refused to traverse the Atlantic in wartime, and Eliot took his topographic point in literary London. They were, unluckily, unable to hold kids.
Eliot and his married woman at first turned to Bertrand Russell, who shared with them both his London flat and his considerable societal resources. Russell and Vivien, nevertheless, became briefly involved, and the agreement soured. Meanwhile Eliot tried urgently to back up himself by learning school, supplemented by a heavy burden of reexamining and extension lecture. To pacify his disquieted parents, he labored on with his Ph.D. thesis, “ Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley. ” As yet one more stimulating but taxing activity, he became adjunct editor of the daring magazine theA ” Egotist ” .A Then in spring 1917 he found steady employment ; his cognition of linguistic communications qualified him for a occupation in the foreign subdivision of Lloyds Bank, where he evaluated a wide scope of Continental paperss.
The occupation gave him the security he needed to turn back to poesy, and in 1917 he received an tremendous encouragement from the publication of his first book, A ” Prufrock ” and “ Other Observations, ” printed by theA EgoistA with the soundless fiscal support of Ezra and Dorothy Pound.
