Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) and Ezra Pound (1885-1872) were two Americans who lived in Europe and altered the manner and form of English poetry. Pound urged a conscious modernization of verse, and, in Eliot he believed he found a poet who had modernized himself already; though Pound still made revisions to Eliot’s work and cut almost half the lines of 'The Waste Land', Eliot’s most famous poem.
Listening to the many recordings he made of his own verse, there is little of the trans-Atlantic in Eliot’s dry voice - wry, with a rasp of humour, and very English. He arrived in London in 1914 and decided to stay. Through Pound he met a vivacious and unstable ballet dancer whom he married – possibly, as a recent commentator has suggested, to disguise his homosexuality.
'The Waste Land' and James Joyce’s Ulysses both appeared in 1922. Leonard and Virginia Woolf hand-printed the early work of Eliot at the Hogarth Press and also accepted Ulysses for publication; however, the latter appeared in Paris because English printers refused to set it. 'The Waste Land' did not meet with any moral objections: it was simply regarded as weird. It was published originally in Eliot’s own journal The Criterion; but what was not known at the time was that Ezra Pound, who had moved to Paris, cut 400 lines from the work with Eliot’s agreement.
The poem has received much critical and scholarly attention. It was erudite. It drew on references to European and Indian culture with odd juxtapositions of the classical and colloquial. Eliot appeared to be exploring the possibilities of regeneration after the collapse of a culture that had lost its certainties and values. The Quest for the Holy Grail is a motif along with figures from Sir James Frazer’s anthropological work The Golden Bough (1911–15) that examined the role of myths in the progress of cultures. To embrace myth and readmit primitive behaviour was not, for C. G. Jung, to flee modernity but to face up to it: and Eliot agreed with Jung rather than Frazer for whom myth was superstition. The Great War had shown Europe to be more primitive than the great and the good cared to admit. 'The Waste Land' is a poem of moods in which the past foreshadows the present and the future waits in hope of grace descending. It even came with its own set of notes.
Eliot rekindled interest in the Metaphysical poets, especially John Donne (1572-1631) and George Herbert (1593-1633). He also attempted to recreate modern verse drama, with less success; the most memorable example being Murder in the Cathedral (1935) which concerns the assassination of Archbishop Thomas Becket on 29 December 1170 in Canterbury Cathedral. It recalled the original foundation of the English church by Augustine at Canterbury and the martyr whose tomb was an object of pilgrimage for four centuries until the Reformation – the goal of Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales.
To Eliot it was an affirmation of his adopted Englishness: an affirmation that found an enduring place in the English literary consciousness through 'Four Quartets' – 'Burnt Norton', which appeared in Collected Poems (1936), 'East Coker' (1940), 'The Dry Salvages' (1941), and 'Little Gidding' (1942) – published together in 1943. The last three poems were composed during the Blitz when Eliot nightly observed the blacked-out city of London in fireflash silhouettes of searchlights and anti-aircraft fire and incendiary bombs falling about the dome of St Paul's; and 'Little Gidding' contains the aftermath of an air raid and a strange meeting with the shade of William Butler Yeats and Stéphane Mallarmé before the All Clear sounds.
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