The life of the poet, ‘the intolerable wrestle with words and meaning’

Empire of the Mind

In the first line of his first published poem, T S Eliot begins with ‘Let us go then, you and I/when the evening is spread out against the sky’ setting out upon the life of the poet, and drawing his readers into his world. The period from 1919, when Eliot began the modernist literary revolution, till 1944 was ‘The Age of Eliot’. Over those 25 years, it was Eliot’s poetry that dominated the literary imagination. This is no longer the ‘The Age of Eliot’, yet he is a poet for our time, and every new generation of readers finds much in his work that addresses current preoccupations.

As readers, the best place to start from, and indeed the only sure place, is wherever we happen to find ourselves; in ‘the present moment of the past,’ as Eliot put it. Reading Eliot should be of special interest to us because Eliot was deeply influenced by the Indian spiritual tradition; the Sanskrit ending of ‘The Waste Land’ to the ‘What Krishna meant’ section of the ‘Four Quartets’ show how much the Upanishads formed the philosophical basis for his poetic imagination.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888, received the Nobel Prize in 1948, and died in 1965. His poetry began with ‘The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in 1915, now considered a modernist masterpiece; though at the time few saw that it heralded a paradigm shift in cultural expression. The poem makes for a fascinating recitation for its powerful imagery; Eliot should be read aloud and the most memorable lines ‘Do I dare/Disturb the universe?/In a minute there is time/for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse/I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. This was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), and ‘Ash Wednesday’ (1930); with the ‘Four Quartets’ (1943), and ‘Little Gidding’ (1942), Eliot bringing to a culmination a life in poetry that he had begun some 30 years earlier.

For a poet of his stature, Eliot published a relatively small body of work, but each of his poems is a classic; and his creative expression best described by Eliot himself writing to J H Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, “My reputation is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind.” Perfect, they doubtless are; and more than a man of letters, Eliot is literature himself.

Interestingly, Eliot began his career training as a professional philosopher -- at Harvard, Sorbonne and Oxford -- rather than as poet; and his roots in philosophy deeply influenced his development as a poet and literary critic. So, Eliot pursues philosophical questions and insightfully attacks them in his poetry.

At the level of society, the dynamism in Eliot’s philosophy is unmistakable with his poetry calling out to his readers that “tradition cannot mean standing still,” since time and history never standstill. At the level of the individual, Eliot’s poetry is a deep inward journey, often discomfiting; a genuine uncanniness and sense of semi-spiritual illumination hover over the ‘third who walks always beside you’ in ‘The Waste Land’. His later poem, ‘Little Gidding’, offers an unforgettable semi-esoteric encounter with a ‘compound ghost,’ part spiritual master, part deep self.

His reading of the Upanishads -- he alludes to the Hymn of Creation from the Rg Veda in ‘The Waste Land’ -- his familiarity with the ways of illumination advanced by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras and, doubtless, many experiences in his own life formed the basis for the vivid renditions of mystical moments in Eliot’s poetry. The moment in ‘The Waste Land’ where ‘I could not/Speak’ and ‘my eyes failed/Looking into the heart of light, the silence’ or the climax of ‘Little Gidding’ where ‘the fire and the rose are one’ are beautiful. Yet, his poetry suggests that the meaning of life eludes Eliot’s grasp, as it often does ours, ‘We had the experience but missed the meaning,’ Eliot would later say.

Eliot’s life was lived for the poetry and in the poetry. Far from closing off the exploration of experience with affirmations of faith, his poetry proves to be unceasingly committed to ‘the intolerable wrestle/with words and meaning,’ and requires of the reader, critical participation in interpreting experience.

Read T S Eliot’s Collected Poems 1909-1962, the best overview of Eliot’s poetry available; a body of work of great relevance in our time, not least in its sage exhortation that a wise not-knowing is the opposite of know-nothingness. This is the Eliot -- various, subtle, and rewarding -- that you will encounter.

Watch the latest DH Videos here: