On T.S. Eliot
If you’re thinking about British literary modernism, 3 figures come to mind:
● Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot
● One of the most, if not the most, important and influential Modernist poets and theorists
in English literature
● Born in the USA, in St. Louis, Missouri, September 26, 1888, and died January 4, 1965
● Influenced by William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound
● Knew Woolf and the Bloomsbury circle
● Like Woolf saw modern life as fragmentary, alienating, requiring an examination of the
inner life not only the outer life, emotional and psychic paralysis
● T.S. Eliot and Woolf were almost exact contemporaries – readers and critics of others’
work, and friends for over twenty years (though their writings are rarely paired)
● Believed he was capturing the elegance of the age and was confident that he was the best
○ The only one he looked up to was Joyce
● “Prufrock” may be his best-known poem, but The Wasteland is probably his best
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
● considered one of T.S. Eliot’s most important contributions to modernism—the onset of
modernism in poetry
● The initial reaction to published in a contemporary review in The Times Literary
Supplement, on the 21st of June 1917
● Moving from Owen’s style
● High Modernists showed off a lot of their education through allusion—Prufrock is highly
allusive, and so was Mrs. Dalloway.
● Modernists didn’t want to be bound to forms and structures that preceded them
If you’re thinking about British literary modernism, 3 figures come to mind:
● Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot
● One of the most, if not the most, important and influential Modernist poets and theorists
in English literature
● Born in the USA, in St. Louis, Missouri, September 26, 1888, and died January 4, 1965
● Influenced by William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound
● Knew Woolf and the Bloomsbury circle
● Like Woolf saw modern life as fragmentary, alienating, requiring an examination of the
inner life not only the outer life, emotional and psychic paralysis
● T.S. Eliot and Woolf were almost exact contemporaries – readers and critics of others’
work, and friends for over twenty years (though their writings are rarely paired)
● Believed he was capturing the elegance of the age and was confident that he was the best
○ The only one he looked up to was Joyce
● “Prufrock” may be his best-known poem, but The Wasteland is probably his best
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
● considered one of T.S. Eliot’s most important contributions to modernism—the onset of
modernism in poetry
● The initial reaction to published in a contemporary review in The Times Literary
Supplement, on the 21st of June 1917
● Moving from Owen’s style
● High Modernists showed off a lot of their education through allusion—Prufrock is highly
allusive, and so was Mrs. Dalloway.
● Modernists didn’t want to be bound to forms and structures that preceded them
