Perhaps more than any other 20th-century figure except James Joyce, T. S. Eliot dominated the literary world during the war and revolutionized poetic and critical style. The publication of Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917 has been compared to the appearance in 1798 of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads. Both events signaled the arrival of a new poetic era. In “Barren
Land,” called by the poet William Carlos Williams “the atomic bomb of poetry,” Eliot captured the spirit of his age, defining his disillusionment and search for moral and spiritual values, the need for a new tradition to replace the cultural barrenness left behind after World War I. Eliot’s career shows his attempt to define this tradition, and if his answers are not satisfactory, his identification of the problem, and his method of conquering the complexity and ambiguity of contemporary experience continue to influence them. Like Joyce, considered the major novelist of the 20th century, Eliot is the leading contemporary poet whose work best fits modernity.
Eliot, who would eventually define himself as “a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion,” was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His grandfather came west to found the first Unitarian Church of St. Louis and Washington University. Eliot’s father was a prosperous brick maker, and his mother was a woman of literary circles. The family spent summers on the Massachusetts coast, and Eliot returned East to college, graduating from Harvard only three years later. He continued as a specialist in philosophy, traveling to Europe, where he attended lectures by Henri Bergson at the Sorbonne and went to Oxford to complete his dissertation with the philosopher F. H. Bradley. Eliot completed his dissertation but did not receive his degree, giving up a future teaching career as a literary scholar in England. In 1915 Eliot married Vivienne Haig-Wood, a woman prone to mental illness, and their 17-year marriage was marked by emotional and physical strain. Eliot supported himself by teaching at an English high school, lecturing and writing reviews and criticism, holding a position at Lloyd’s Bank for eight years. Friends, led by the poet Ezra Pound, tried to find means to relieve him of his job at Lloyd’s Bank, which was a barren land that disgusted Eliot. He enjoyed the job, which, despite the tedious writing, provided a favorable lifestyle that helped him cope with his chaotic family life. Scrupulous and withdrawn, Eliot suffered a mental breakdown in 1921 and was treated in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1922 he published his significant work, The Barren Land, which threw the critics’ crowd into genuine confusion, but created a sensation-especially among young people, who regarded Eliot as the personification of our time, a literary symbol whose poetic technique, vision and artistic sensibility were deeply influential. With his characteristic shyness, he turned down a role that, in a profound sense, represented a whole generation.
In 1925 he left Lloyd’s to be editor at Faber and Faber. There he took a position with which he did not part for the rest of his life. He also became a British subject and converted to Anglicanism. He focused his creative efforts on drama, moving away from poetry. In his works, most notably Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Meeting (1939), and The Cocktail Party (1950), he created a new kind of poetic drama, inspired by the search for spiritual meaning so aptly sought in his poetry. A number of Eliot’s critical works were hugely influential in defining literary taste, confirming the authority of metaphysical poets such as John Donne and recreating a critical structure for a new modern classicism to replace the vagueness and moralizing of the Victorians. His final phase of poetic work falls between 1934 and 1943 and is regarded by many as Eliot’s greatest artistic legacy. The poems are reflections on the power of memory and private experience as a method of attaining a form of superiority, to which many of Eliot’s studies are devoted.
The state of English poetry in Eliot’s time was largely exhausted and stale. The Romantic innovations of personal exploration had been swallowed up by the rapid pace of Victorian moralizing; the new trends proved to be something more than a meaningless posturing and a set of Western traditions broken by the experience of the First World War. English poetry was re-enacted by the Irishman W. B. Yeats and two American expatriates, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. At the center of Eliot’s poetics was a quest, a desire to endow language with new means of extracting contemporary experience. In his essay “Poets are Metaphysicians,” Eliot gives an insight into his intentions: “Our civilization is characterized by great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity must lead to different and many-sided results. The poet must become more comprehensive, more allegorical, more evasive in order to influence, to change the meaning of language when necessary.”
To give meaning less complexity, Eliot employed a strategy adopted from the French Symbolists and Imagists; misunderstandings and disagreements enter into a relationship with the main element, or as Eliot called the “objective correlate,” some specific detail that evokes thought and feeling. Eliot’s first significant poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Praphrock,” written in 1910 but not published until 1915, defined his poetic method and the characteristic problems raised in the work. Confronting all the vulgarity and squalor of modern life, Eliot creates a dramatic monologue in which Prafrock shows his consciousness through a series of startling images of a separate mind gripped by its own inadequacy. Eliot’s technical device is cinematic: he explored Prafrock’s neuroses not through analysis but through images that show his deepest fears and his regressive vision of himself as “a pair of jagged claws / escaping across the bottom of the silent seas.”
“Barren Land” is Eliot’s particular extended and in-depth approach. At the center of the work is a dramatic exploitation of the skills of mimicry and fragmentation, as remnants of hints and cultural references are linked to contrast the barrenness of modern experience with an earlier heroic tradition of supporting myths and values. The result is a symphony of voices, scenes, and images that surround the central question of what can be believed when the possibility of belief is absent. With Ezra Pound’s help, Eliot has removed much of the cohesive matter of the linear story and continued to move directly to a series of moments of greatest depth in which the responsibility of the reader is to reassemble “a heap of discontinuous images” and “fragments arranged on my ruins” into a meaningful model.
Eliot’s “Barren Land” is one of the central literary reference points of the 20th century, a foundation to which later poets have continued to refer. Both James Joyce’s Ulysses and “The Barren Land” had such a strong influence that we continue to wait for the next Joyce or Eliot to arrive at the next important turn in artistic consciousness.