Thomas Sterns Eliot. Murder in the Cathedral.

BIRTH:

Thomas Stearns Eliot. September 26, 1888 in Missouri. Father, Henry Ware Eliot, the president of the Hydraulic Brick Company. Mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, volunteer at the Humanity Club of St. Louis. was a teacher. At the time of Eliot’s birth, his parents were in their mid-forties siblings were already grown.

EDUCATION:

attended Harvard University; left with a masters and undergraduate degrees. Returned to Harvard to receive a doctorate degree in philosophy. Toured the continent after Harvard. 1915 married first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood. 1917 began working at Lloyd’s bank in London. 1925 left the bank to work at a publishing firm. 1927 converted to Anglicanism, dropped U.S. citizenship, became a British subject. 1933 separated from Vivienne. Vivienne’s possible affair with Bertrand Russell? Avoiding all but one meeting with her between 1932 and her death in 1947. 1948 won Nobel prize. 1957 married Esme Valerie Fletcher. Had been his secretary at the publishing house since 1949. 37 years his junior (he was nearly 70, she was 32). Preserved his literary legacy after Eliot’s death. In 1965, he died of emphysema (tüdőtágulás) in London at the age of seventy-seven. 1983 won two posthumous Tony Awards for “Cats”. Modern life is chaotic, futile (felületes), fragmentary (töredékes). Eliot argues that modern poetry “must be difficult” to match the intricacy (bonyolultság) of modern experience. Poetry should reflect this fragmentary nature of life: “ The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive (utaló, célzó), more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning”. This nature of life should be projected, not analyzed. A poem should be an organic thing in itself, a made object. Once it is finished, the poet will no longer have control of it. It should be judged, analyzed by itself without the interference of the poet’s personal influence and intentional elements and other elements. Use the past to serve the present and future “simultaneous order”, how the past, present, future interrelate. Sometimes at the same time, borrow from authors that are: remote in time, alien in language, diverse in interest, use the past to underscore what is missing from the present.