Ts Eliot Essays Poetry

He started describing himself as "classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion".

In 1927, the same year he became a British subject, he published the short poem "Journey of the Magi", continuing his own pilgrimage toward religious faith that culminated in the meditative "Ash-Wednesday" (1930).

The 1930 work is considered by some his fourth great long poem, although others give that honour to Four Quartets, which collects pieces from 1935 to 1942.

From the 1930s on, Eliot focused more on his project of resurrecting poetic drama.

He moved to Britain in 1914 and met Ezra Pound, who helped him edit his poetry and get published. Alfred Prufrock", was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917).

His second volume, printed by Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press, was Ara Vos Prec (1919), published in the United States as simply Poems (1920). I'd found his poetry and drama overly intellectual, elitist and disdainful of the real world we live in.But not long ago, I came upon a collection of so-called modern verse put together in 1930.In 1922 his poetic and critical careers publicly converged, when The Waste land appeared (without notes) in the first issue of The Criterion, a literary periodical established under his editorship.The Times reviewer, with surprising restraint, contented himself with noting that this poem was sometimes "very near the limits of coherency"; it was widely felt to be a scandalous affair.From its famous opening ("April is the cruelest month") to its prayerful conclusion ("Shantih shantih shantih") this five-part poem—complete with Eliot's own footnotes—may be the most studied and analyzed work of literature in modern times.Or that honour may go to "The Hollow Men" (1925), a shorter, more popular presentation of the same ideas.The collection starts with "Gerontion", self-described in a much-quoted passage as "Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry month".But the book also includes "Burbank with a Baedeker; Bleistein with a Cigar" with its derogatory references to Jewish figures. If Eliot's disdain for the temporal, physical world showed in his early work, it was nothing compared to his next long poem, "The Waste Land" (1922).Before long he figured among the "drunken helots" of an enraged reviewer's assault on literary Bolshevism; the Spartans, it seems, used to promote orgies among their serfs, to serve as a horrible example to the well-bred, and this was the only kind of purpose the reviewer in question could imagine such poetry fulfilling.Eliot went on reviewing for The New Statesman, The Athenaeum, even The Times Literary Supplement, and working in Lloyd's Bank.