166 EBERHART

benignly indifferent. As James Cotter expressed it, in reviewing Eberhart's Collected Poems
1930-1976 (America, 18 September 1976), the owl's cry tells man nothing unless one goes
"somewhere beyond realism," and learns to "listen to the tune of the spiritual. Nature does
not love or heed us. We are the lovers of nature."

-Lois Gordon

ELIOT, T(homas) S(tearns). English. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A., 26 September
I 888 ; naturalized, I 9 2 7. Educated at Smith Academy, St. Louis, I 8 9 8-1 90 5 ; Milton
Academy, Massachusetts, 1905-D6; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (Editor,
Harvard Advocate, 1909-10; Sheldon Fellowship, for study in Munich, 1914), 1906-10,
1911-14, B.A. 1909, M.A. 1910; the Sorbonne, Paris, 191D--II; Merton College, Oxford,
1914-15. Married I) Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915 (died, 1947); 2) Esme Valerie Fletcher,
1957. Teacher, High Wycombe Grammar School, Buckinghamshire, and Highgate School,
London, 1915-17; Clerk, Lloyds Bank, London, 1917-25; Editor, later Director, Faber and
Gwyer, later Faber and Faber, publishers, London, 1926-65. Assistant Editor, The Egoist,
London, 1917-19; Founding Editor, The Criterion, London, 1922-39. Clark Lecturer,
Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926; Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard
University, 1932-33; Page-Barbour Lecturer, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1933;
Theodore Spencer Memorial Lecturer, Harvard University, 1950. President, Classical
Association, 1941, Virgil Society, 1943, and Books Across the Sea, 1943-46. Resident,
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, New Jersey, 1950; Honorary Fellow,
Merton College, Oxford, and Magdalene College, Cambridge. Recipient: Nobel Prize for
Literature, 1948; New York Drama Critics Circle Award, 1950; Hanseatic Goethe Prize,
1954; Dante Gold Medal, Florence, 1959; Order of Merit, Bonn, 1959; American Academy
of Arts and Sciences Emerson-Thoreau Medal, 1960. Litt.D.: Columbia University, New
York, 1933; Cambridge University, 1938; University of Bristol, 1938; University of Leeds,
1939; Harvard University, 1947; Princeton University, 1947; Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut, 1947; Washington University, St. Louis, 1953; University of Rome, 1958;
University of Sheffield, 1959; LL.D.: University of Edinburgh, 1937; University of St.
Andrews, 1953; D.Litt.: Oxford University, 1948; D.Lit.: University of London, 1950;
Docteur-es-Lettres, University of Aix-Marseille, 1959; University of Rennes, 1959; D.Phil.:
University of Munich, 1959. Officer, Legion of Honor; Honorary Member, American
Academy of Arts and Letters; Foreign Member, Accademia dei Lincei, Rome, and Akademie
der Schonen Kiinste. Order of Merit, 1948. Died 4 January /965.

PUBLICATIONS

Collections

Selected Prose, edited by Frank Kermode. 197 5.

 ELIOT 167

Verse

Prufrock and Other Observations. 191 7.

Poems. 1919.
Ara Vos Prec. 1920; as Poems, 1920.
The Waste Land. 1922; A Facsimile and Transcripts of the Original Drafts Including
the Annotations of Ezra Pound, edited by Valerie Eliot, 1971.
Poems 1909-1925. 1925.
Ash-Wednesday. 1930.
Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama. 1932.
Collected Poems 1909-1935. 1936.
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. 1939.
The Waste Land and Other Poems. 1940.
East Coker. 1940.
Later Poems 1925-1935. 1941.
The Dry Salvages. I 941.
Little Gidding. 1942.
Four Quartets. 1943.
A Practical Possum. 194 7.
Selected Poems. 1948.
The Undergraduate Poems ofT. S. Eliot. 1949.
Poems Written in Early Youth, edited by John Hayward. 1950.
Collected Poems 1909-1962. 1963.

Plays

The Rock: A Pageant Play (produced 1934). 1934.

Murder in the Cathedral (produced 1935). 1935; revised version, as The Film of
Murder in the Cathedral, 1952.
The Family Reunion (produced 1939). 1939.
The Cocktail Party (produced 1949). 1950; revised edition, 1950.
The Confidential Clerk (produced 1953). 1954.
The Elder Statesman (produced 1958). 1959.
Collected Plays: Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The
Confidential Clerk, The Elder Statesman. 1962; as The Complete Plays, 1969.

Other

Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry. 1917.

The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1920.
Homage to John Dryden: Three Essays on Poetry in the Seventeenth Century. 1924.
For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. 1928.
Dante. 1929.
Thoughts after Lambeth. 1931.
Selected Essays 1917-1932. 1932; revised edition, 1950.
John Dryden: The Poet, The Dramatist, The Critic. 1932.
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry
in England. 1933.
After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. 1934.
Elizabethan Essays. 1934; as Elizabethan Dramatists, 1963.
Essays Ancient and Modern. 1936.
The Idea of a Christian Society. 1939.
168 EUOT

Points of View, edited by John Hayward. 1941.

Reunion by Destruction: Reflections on a Scheme for Church Unity in South India
Addressed to the Laity. 1943.
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. 1948.
The Complete Poems and Plays. 1952.
Selected Prose, edited by Johit Hayward. 1953.
On Poetry and Poets. 1957.
George Herbert. 1962.
Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (doctoral
dissertation). 1964.
To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings. 1965.
The Literary Criticism ofEliot: New Essays, edited by David Newton de-Molina. 1977.

Editor, Selected Poems, by Ezra Pound. 1928; revised edition, 1949.

Editor, A Choice of Kipling's Verse. 1941.
Editor, Introducing James Joyce. 1942.
Editor, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. 1954.
Editor, The Criterion 1922-1939. 18 vols., 1967.

Translator, Anabasis: A Poem by St.-John Perse. 1930; revised edition, 1938, 1949,
1959.

Bibliography: Eliot: A Bibliography by Donald Gallup, 1952, revised edition, 1969; The
Merrill Checklist of Eliot by B. Gunter, 1970.

Reading List: The Achievement of Eliot: An Essay on the Nature of Poetry by F. 0.

Matthiessen, 1935, revised edition, 1947, with additional material by C. L. Barber, 1958;
Four Quartets Rehearsed by R. Preston, 1946; Eliot: The Design of His Poetry by Elizabeth
Drew, 1949; The Art of Eliot by Helen Gardner, 1949; The Poetry of Eliot by D. E. S.
Maxwell, 1952; Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning by Grover Smith,
1956, revised edition, 1975; The Invisible Poet: Eliot by Hugh Kenner 1959; Eliot: A
Collection of Critical Essays edited by Hugh Kenner, 1962; Eliot's Dramatic Theory and
Practice by Carol H. Smith, 1963; Eliot by Northrop Frye, 1963; Eliot: Movements and
Patterns by Leonard Unger, 1966; Eliot by Bernard Bergonzi, 1972; Eliot in His Time: Essays
on the Occasion ofthe Fiftieth Anniversary of The Waste Land edited by A. Walton Litz, 1973;
Eliot: The Longer Poems by Derek Traversi, 1976.

T. S. Eliot's influence was predominant in English poetry in the period between the two
World Wars. His first small volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations appeared in
1917. The title is significant. Eliot's earliest verse is composed of observations, detached,
ironic, and alternately disillusioned and nostalgic in tone. The prevailing influence is that of
French poetry, and in particular of Jules Laforgue; the mood is one of reaction against the
comfortable certainties of "Georgian" poetry, the projection of a world which presented itself
to the poet and his generation as disconcerting, uncertain, and very possibly heading for
destruction.
The longest poem in the volume, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," shows these
qualities, but goes beyond them. The speaker is a kind of modern Hamlet, a man who after a
life passed in devotion to the trivial has awakened to a sense of his own futility and to that of
 ELIOT 169

the world around him. He feels that some decisive act of commitment is needed to break the
meaningless flow of events which his life offers. The question, however, is whether he really
dares to reverse the entire course of his existence by a decision the nature of which eludes
him:

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair ...
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

The answer, for Prufrock, is negative. Dominated by his fear of life, misunderstood when he
tries to express his sense of a possible revelation, Prufrock concludes "No! I am not Prince
Hamlet, nor was meant to be," refuses to accept the role which life for a moment seemed to
have thrust upon him, and returns to the stagnation which his vision of reality imposes.
After a second small volume, published in 1919, which shows, more especially in its most
impressive poem, "Gerontion," a notable deepening into tragedy, the publication in 1922 of
The Waste Land burst upon its readers with the effect of a literary revolution. Many of its first
readers found the poem arid and incomprehensible, though it was in fact neither. The poet
tells us that he is working through "a heap of broken images." He does this because it is a
world of dissociated fragments that he is describing; but his aim, like that of any artist, is not
merely an evocation of chaos. The poem is built on the interweaving of two great themes: the
broken pieces of the present, as it presents itself to a disillusioned contemporary
understanding, and the significant continuity of tradition. These two strains begin apart, like
two separate themes in a musical composition, but the poem is animated by the hope, the
method, that at the end they will converge into some kind of unity. Some critics, reading it in
the light of Eliot's later development, have tried to find in the poem a specifically "religious"
content, which however is not there. At best, there is a suggestion at the close that such a
content, were it available, might provide a way out of the "waste land" situation, that the life-
giving rain may be on the point of relieving the intolerable drought; but the poet cannot
honestly propose such a resolution and the step which might have affirmed it is never
rendered actual.
For some years after 1922, Eliot wrote little poetry and the greater part of his effort went
into critical prose, much of it published in The Criterion, the literary quarterly which he
edited until 1939. Eliot's criticism, which profoundly affected the literary taste of his
generation, contributed to the revaluation of certain writers - the lesser Elizabethan
dramatists, Donne, Marvell, Dryden - and, more controversially, to the depreciation of
others, such as Milton (concerning whom, however, Eliot later modified his views) and some
of the Romantic poets. It was the work of a poet whose interest in other writers was largely
conditioned by the search for solutions to the problems raised by his own art; and, as such, it
was marked by the idiosyncracies which constitute at once its strength and its limitation.
In 1928, in his preface to the collection of essays For Lance/ot Andrewes, Eliot declared
himself Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, classicist in literature: a typically
enigmatic statement which indicated the direction he was to give to the work of his later
years. 1930 saw the publication of Ash- Wednesday, his first considerable poem of explicitly
Christian inspiration: a work at once religious in content and modern in inspiration, personal
yet without concession to sentiment. The main theme is an acceptance of conversion as a
necessary and irretrievable act. The answer to the question posed by Prufrock- "Do I dare/
Disturb the universe?" - is seen, in the translation of the first line of the Italian poet Guido
Cavalcanti's ballad, "Because I do not hope to turn again," as an embarkation, dangerous but
decisive, upon the adventure of faith.
The consequences of this development were explored in the last and in some respects the
most ambitious of Eliot's poetic efforts: the sequence of poems initiated in 1935 and finally
170 ELIOT

published, in 1943, under the title of Four Quartets. The series opens, in Burnt Norton, with
an exploration of the possible significance of certain moments which seem to penetrate,
briefly and elusively, a reality beyond that of normal temporal experience. "To be conscious,"
the poem suggests, "is not to be in time": only to balance that possibility with the counter-
assertion that "Only through time time is conquered." The first step towards an
understanding of the problems raised in the Quartets is a recognition that time, though
inseparable from our human experience, is not the whole of it. If we consider time as an
ultimate reality, our spiritual intuitions are turned into an illusion: whereas if we seek to deny
the reality of time, our experience becomes impossible. The two elements- the temporal and
the timeless - need to be woven together in an embracing pattern of experience which is, in
fact, the end to which the entire sequence points.
The later "quartets" build upon this provisional foundation in the light of the poet's
experience as artist and human being. The impulse to create in words reflects another, still
more fundamental, impulse which prompts men to seekform, coherence, and meaning in the
broken intuitions which their experience offers them. The nature of the search is such that it
can never be complete in time. The true value of our actions only begins to emerge when we
abstract ourselves from the temporal sequence- "time before and time after" -in which they
were realized; and the final sense of our experience only reveals itself when the pattern is
completed, at the moment of death. This moment, indeed, is not properly speaking a single
final point, but a reality which covers the whole course of our existence.
These reflections lead the poet, in the last two poems of the series, The Dry Salvages and
Little Gidding, to acceptance and even to a certain optimism. The end of the journey becomes
the key to its beginning, and this in turn an invitation to confidence: "Not fare well,/But fare
forward, voyagers." The doctrine of detachment explored in the second poem, East Coker,
becomes an "expanding" one of "love beyond desire." The conclusion stresses the continuity
between the "birth" and "death" which are simultaneously present in each moment, in each
individual life, and in the history of the human race. It is true, as the closing section of Little
Gidding puts it, that "we die with the dying"; but it is equally true, as they also go on to say,
that "we are born with the dead." We die, in other words, as part of the tragedy which the
fact of our humanity implies, but we are born again when, having understood the temporal
process in its true light, we are ready to accept our present position within a still-living and
continually unfolding tradition.
Eliot's poetic output was relatively small and intensely concentrated: a fact which at once
confirms its value and constitutes, in some sense, a limiting factor. It should be mentioned
that in his later years he devoted himself to the writing of verse plays, in an attempt to create a
contemporary mode of poetic drama. The earlier plays, Murder in the Cathedral and The
Family Reunion, which are also the best, take up the themes which were being explored at
the same time in his poetry and develop them in ways that are often interesting. The Cocktail
Party, though still a skilful work, shows some decline in conception and execution, and the
later plays- The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman- can safely be said to add little
to Eliot's achievement.

-Derek A. Traversi

EMPSON, William English. Born in Yokefleet, East Yorkshire, 27 September 1906.

Educated at Winchester College; Magdalene College, Cambridge, B.A. in mathematics 1929,
M.A. 1935. Married Hester Henrietta Crouse in 1941; two children. Held Chair of English
Literature, Bunrika Daigaku University, Tokyo, 1931-34; Professor of English Literature,