TS Eliot: An Introduction

T.S. Eliot, American-English poet, playwright, editor and literary critic, heralded a new dawn as the pioneer of the modernist movement in literature. His name has become synonymous with modernism and the general change that came about in the realm of imaginative literature and criticism between the years 1910 and 1939. Eliot’s description of himself in his preface to ‘For Lancelot Andrews’ as a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics and an Anglo-Catholic in religion sets the tone for his lifelong commitment to criticism. His five hundred odd essays published as reviews and articles from time to time have exerted a tremendous influence on the critical temper of the twentieth century. As George Watson remarks, “Eliot made English criticism look different but not in a simple sense.” He held very strong and dogmatic beliefs, and turned the critical tradition of the English speaking world upside down with his revolutionary criticism. Eliot’s critical works include such books as ‘The Sacred Wood’, ‘Homage to John Dryden’, ‘For Lancelot Andrews’, ‘Selected Essays’, ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism’, ‘Elizabethan Essays’ and ‘Essays Ancient and Modern’. Yeats and Eliot are also considered as anti-modernists. Besides being baptised, Eliot also believes in the cycle of the gradual increase, peak and decline. The civilisation being replace by another civilisation. The decline has to happen—It is inevitable. The idea of eventually meeting one’s fate. Oldness is being replaced by modern life. He defies modernism by constantly going back to older civilisation. Yeats is sceptical of the age and where the civilisation is heading the ending and the downfall of the Greek civilisation. There could be a new civilisation—but he doesn’t know what kind of civilisation will it be. Track: Chopin - Etude Op. 10 No.1 - No.12 Music provided by Classical Music Copyright Free