Thomas Stearns Eliot is generally recognized as one of the twentieth-century’s foremost poets and literary critics. Born in America, Eliot was a resident of London from 1915 onward and became a British citizen in 1927. His often-quoted definition of himself is ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’.
Eliot’s first mature poems, The Love Song Of J. ‘Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘Preludes’, were published in 1915, followed by Poems in 1919. He founded his important literary and critical quarterly, The Criterion, in 1922, the same year that his poem The Waste Land appeared, now recognized as perhaps the most significant work of the twentieth century. The Waste Land must, under any critical reservation, stand as a clue and summary of much of the spiritual and literary history of our time. This was followed by a number of other now-famous poems and collections, The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943) , as well as two plays, Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1950), and a host of works dealing with literary criticism.
The heart of T.S. Eliot’s literary affirmation is his perception of the spiritual desolation and sterility of mankind in the modern age compared with the ‘heroic and sanctified glories of the past’. Modern man, so to speak, inhabits a spiritual wasteland. He is, so far as an awareness of the spiritual significance of life is concerned, empty:
We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men. Leaning together, Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together, Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass, Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar.
For Eliot, modern man tragically lacks the mystical support of the Christian doctrines of grace and redemption. He is in need of expressing his dependence upon God in prayer (Four Quartets), and of the acceptance of sacrifice in the specifically Christian sense (Murder In the Cathedral).