Essays on T.s. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot born 26 September 1888

4 January 1965

Poet, essayist, playwright, publisher, critic

Modernism

• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
• The Waste Land (1922)
• Four Quartets (1943)
• Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

• Nobel Prize in Literature (1948)
• Order of Merit (1948)

• “Only those who wil"l risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
• “Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.”
• “If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?”

26 September 1888 – 4 January 1965

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. Considered one of the 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915), The Waste Land (1922), Four Quartets (1943), Murder in the Cathedral (1935)

Eliot is synonymous with modernism. Everything about his poetry bespeaks high modernism: its use of myth to undergird and order atomized modern experience; its collage-like juxtaposition of different voices, traditions, and discourses; and its focus on form as the carrier of meaning.

T.S. Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones.

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
“Sometimes things become possible if we want them bad enough.”