Who did T. S. Eliot marry and when did they get married?

T. S. Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood at Hampstead Register Office on the 26th of June 1915.

What religious conversion did T. S. Eliot undergo in 1927?

On the 29th of June 1927 T. S. Eliot converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism and took British citizenship in November of that same year.

Which poem by T. S. Eliot is considered a touchstone of modern literature published in 1922?

The Waste Land was published in The Criterion in October 1922 and stands as a touchstone of modern literature alongside James Joyce's Ulysses.

T. S. Eliot: the story on HearLore

Q: How did T. S. Eliot die and when did he pass away?

T. S. Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington London on the 4th of January 1965.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on the 26th of September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. He lived at a house on Locust Street for his first sixteen years before leaving to attend school elsewhere. His father Henry Ware Eliot ran the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company while his mother Charlotte Champe Stearns worked as a social worker and wrote poetry herself. The young boy suffered from a congenital double inguinal hernia which prevented him from joining many physical activities. This isolation led him to curl up behind an enormous book in a window seat where he set what one friend called the drug of dreams against the pain of living. He devoured tales of savage life and Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer with obsessive intensity once he learned to read. Eliot attended Smith Academy from 1898 until 1905 where his studies included Ancient Greek Latin French and German. He began writing poetry at age fourteen under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. These early attempts were gloomy and despairing so he destroyed them. His first published poem A Fable For Feasters appeared in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905. Three short stories followed that same year including Birds of Prey and The Man Who Was King. The last story reflected his exploration of the Igorot Village during the 1904 St. Louis World Fair. After graduating from Smith Academy he spent a preparatory year at Milton Academy in Massachusetts. There he met Scofield Thayer who would later publish The Waste Land. Eliot entered Harvard College in 1906 earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in three years instead of four due to his time at Milton. He completed a Master of Arts in English literature the following year. Frank Kermode identified 1908 as the most important moment of his undergraduate career when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature. This introduction led him to Jules Laforgue Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine Eliot wrote he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book Les amours jaunes which affected the course of his life.

Before leaving the United States Eliot told Emily Hale that he was in love with her. They exchanged letters from Oxford during 1914 and 1915 but did not meet again until 1927. Less than four months after writing to Conrad Aiken about his dependence on women Scofield Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivienne Haigh-Wood. They were married at Hampstead Register Office on the 26th of June 1915. The marriage proved markedly unhappy partly because of Vivienne's health problems. In a letter addressed to Ezra Pound she listed symptoms including recurrent high temperature fatigue insomnia migraines and colitis. Apparent mental instability meant doctors sent her away for extended periods hoping to improve her condition. As time passed Eliot became increasingly detached from her. Witnesses reported both partners complained frequently of physical and mental illness while Eliot drank excessively and Vivienne developed a liking for opium and ether prescribed for medical issues. The couple separated in 1932 and formally separated in 1933. In 1938 Vivienne's brother Maurice had her committed to a mental hospital against her will where she remained until her death from heart disease in 1947. When told via phone call from the asylum that Vivienne had died unexpectedly during the night Eliot is said to have buried his face in his hands and cried out Oh God oh God. Their relationship later became the subject of a 1984 play titled Tom & Viv which was adapted as a film in 1994. In a private paper written in his sixties Eliot confessed he came to persuade himself that he was in love with Vivienne simply because he wanted to burn his boats and commit himself to staying in England. He added that she persuaded herself under the influence of Ezra Pound that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her the marriage brought no happiness while to him it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.

On the 29th of June 1927 Eliot converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism. In November of that same year he took British citizenship thereby renouncing his United States citizenship if he had not officially done so previously. He became a churchwarden of his parish church St Stephen's on Gloucester Road in London and a life member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr. He specifically identified as Anglo-Catholic proclaiming himself classicist in literature royalist in politics and anglo-catholic in religion. About thirty years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined a Catholic cast of mind a Calvinist heritage and a Puritanical temperament. He also held wider spiritual interests commenting that he saw the path of progress for modern man in his occupation with his own self and inner being. He cited Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rudolf Steiner as exemplars of such a direction during a radio interview on the 26th of September 1959. One biographer Peter Ackroyd noted that the purposes of this conversion were two-fold. First the Church of England offered Eliot some hope for himself since he needed a resting place. Second it attached him to the English community and English culture. This shift marked a central pivot in his life as he moved away from his American roots toward a new national identity.

Eliot first attracted widespread attention for The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock which appeared in 1915. At the time of its publication critics considered the work outlandish. An unsigned review in Literary World dated the 5th of July 1917 described the poem's opening lines comparing the evening sky to a patient etherised upon a table as shocking and offensive. The structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri and referred to works including William Shakespeare's play Hamlet and those of the French Symbolists. In October 1922 Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion. His dedication to il miglior fabbro refers to Ezra Pound's significant hand in editing and reshaping the poem from a longer manuscript into the shortened version that appears in publication. It was composed during a period of personal difficulty when his marriage was failing and both partners suffered from nervous disorders. Before the poem's publication as a book in December 1922 Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair writing to Richard Aldington on the 15th of November 1922 that it was a thing of the past so far as he was concerned. The poem is known for its disjointed nature due to its usage of allusion and quotation and its abrupt changes of speaker location and time. This structural complexity made it a touchstone of modern literature alongside James Joyce's Ulysses which was published in the same year. Among its best-known phrases are April is the cruellest month I will show you fear in a handful of dust and These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

With the important exception of Four Quartets Eliot directed much of his creative energies after Ash Wednesday to writing plays in verse mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama citing John Webster Thomas Middleton Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in The Waste Land. In a 1933 lecture he stated every poet would like to think he had some direct social utility and could be something of a popular entertainer able to convey the pleasures of poetry to larger groups collectively. After The Waste Land he wrote that he was now feeling toward a new form and style. One project involved writing a play in verse using rhythms of early jazz featuring Sweeney a character who appeared in several poems. Although Eliot did not finish the play he published two scenes titled Fragment of a Prologue and Fragment of an Agon together in 1932 as Sweeney Agonistes. A pageant play called The Rock was performed in 1934 for the benefit of churches in the Diocese of London where Eliot accepted credit only for one scene and the choruses. George Bell Bishop of Chichester commissioned Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This work Murder in the Cathedral concerned the martyrdom of Thomas Becket and was more under Eliot's control. Peter Ackroyd noted that for Eliot these plays offered a double advantage allowing him to practice poetry while providing a convenient home for his religious sensibility. He later worked on commercial plays including The Family Reunion in 1939 The Cocktail Party in 1949 The Confidential Clerk in 1953 and The Elder Statesman first performed in 1958.

Eliot made significant contributions to literary criticism strongly influencing the school of New Criticism. He was somewhat self-deprecating once saying his criticism was merely a by-product of his private poetry workshop. Yet critic William Empson remarked he did not know how much of his own mind Eliot invented or how much was a reaction against him. Eliot proved a very penetrating influence perhaps not unlike the east wind. In his critical essay Tradition and the Individual Talent Eliot argued art must be understood not in a vacuum but in the context of previous pieces of art. He stated an artist must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past introducing the idea that value must be viewed in the context of simultaneous order of works. This concept influenced many critics who took a cue from his classical ideals and religious thought. They also adopted his attention to early seventeenth-century drama and his deprecation of Romantics like Percy Shelley. Also important to New Criticism was the idea of an objective correlative articulated in Eliot's essay Hamlet and His Problems. This notion posits a connection among words events states of mind and experiences suggesting non-subjective judgment based on different readers' interpretations. More generally New Critics followed his proposition that good poems constitute not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion. His 1922 poem The Waste Land can be better understood through this critical lens showing personal despair about the First World War rather than objective historical understanding.

The depiction of Jews in some of Eliot's poems has led several critics to accuse him of antisemitism most forcefully Anthony Julius in his book T. S. Eliot Anti-Semitism and Literary Form published in 1996. In Gerontion Eliot writes in the voice of the elderly narrator And the jew squats on the window sill the owner of my building Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp. Another example appears in Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar where he wrote The rats are underneath the piles The jew is underneath the lot Money in furs. In lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933 and published under the title After Strange Gods A Primer of Modern Heresy Eliot wrote of societal tradition unity of religious background and reasons of race and religion combining to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable. He never re-published this book or lecture. In his 1934 pageant play The Rock he distances himself from Fascist movements by caricaturing Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts who firmly refuse to descend to palaver with anthropoid Jews. Craig Raine defended Eliot from charges of anti-Semitism in books published in 2001 and 2006 while Paul Dean concluded that however much Eliot may have been compromised as a person his greatness as a poet remains. Critic Terry Eagleton questioned the basis for Raine's defense writing why critics feel a need to defend authors like doting parents deaf to all criticism of their obnoxious children. Despite these debates his well-earned reputation as a poet stands established beyond all doubt.

Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington London on the 4th of January 1965 and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. His ashes were taken to St Michael and All Angels' Church East Coker the village in Somerset from which his ancestors had emigrated to America. A wall plaque in the church commemorates him with a quotation from his poem East Coker stating In my beginning is my end In my end is my beginning. In 1967 on the second anniversary of his death he was commemorated by placement of a large stone in Poets' Corner Westminster Abbey inscribed with his life dates Order of Merit and a quotation from Little Gidding. He received numerous honors including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 for his outstanding pioneer contribution to present-day poetry. Other awards included the Hanseatic Goethe Prize in 1955 and the Dante Medal in 1959. The Broadway production of The Cocktail Party won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. Posthumously he received two Tony Awards in 1983 for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score for poems used in Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats first produced in the West End in 1981. A blue plaque was placed on No. 3 Kensington Court Gardens where he lived and died in 1986. He was also honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 and Officier de la Légion d'honneur in France in 1951. Eliot College at the University of Kent bears his name while he appeared on U.S. commemorative postage stamps and holds a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

T. S. Eliot

Marriage And Turmoil

Continue Browsing

Common questions

Conversion And Citizenship

Modernist Poetry Revolution

Plays And Theater

Literary Criticism Legacy

Antisemitism And Controversy

Honors And Recognition