On the 26th September, 1888 the Anglo-American poet, essayist and playwright T.S Eliot was born. His work was considered modernist in style despite Eliot’s sincere traditionalist beliefs. He was born in St Louis, Missouri and he was the son of a prominent and wealthy family who had relocated to the area from Boston.
The Eliots were a highly influential family in Boston and were part of an elite group of families that soon became known as the “Boston Brahmins”. The Boston Brahmins were a very select and distinct group of privileged people who inhabited the upper echelons of society, and kept their ancestral and cultural connections to Britain. In Eliot’s case, his ancestral home was situated in East Coker, Somerset.
Eliot developed a prodigious talent for poetry and was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford in 1914. However when the First World War broke out, this changed his fortunes, and his outlook. He left Oxford after a year and moved to London. He took various teaching jobs and continued to write poetry where he eventually attracted the attention of fellow poet and compatriot Ezra Pound. Pound soon became a friend and a mentor.
In 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. However the marriage was destined to fail right from the beginning, Vivienne was nervous and fragile. Her emotional vulnerabilities proved to be too difficult for both of them to cope with and she was committed to an asylum. Eliot felt profound guilt and was on the verge of a mental breakdown himself. His poetry was imbued with this guilt and pessimism, and coloured by the political instability of the world.
Consequently he used his strident poetic voice to elicit greater truths that transcended the often petty concerns that bedevilled mortal humans. In his mind, modernity was a lie, it simply detached mankind from its natural environment and only diminished men and women to things. Throughout the nineteen twenties he composed dark verse that epitomised the mood of those times. In his poetic journey he took his own spiritual journey towards enlightenment, and he ultimately found succour in the Anglican faith of his forefathers.
However it was a long and arduous path, strewn with self-doubt and recrimination. In a world that was gradually turning its back on any semblance of peace, harmony or universal understanding, it must have felt like a pointless and thankless task with no conceivable end point. The most striking poem from this period is “The Hollow Men” which was written at the peak of his personal crisis in 1925.
The poem reveals a world bereft of morality, humanity and meaning. It is a world only populated with dead souls. Three years earlier he published “The Waste Land” a solemn lamentation of a lost landscape devastated by the thoughtless actions of empty, deadened men.
It is incredibly apposite that these poems were published in the interwar years when a far greater horror was hovering on the horizon. However his experiences of the Second World War inspired the bleak majesty of “Four Quartets”, a series of elegiac poems dedicated to the eternal elements that remain with us even amidst war and death. We must remember his potent poetic voice as the world turns dark once more.
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