TS Eliot: the poet who conquered the

world, 50 years on

TS Eliot, once a subversive outsider, became the most celebrated poet of the 20th
century a world poet, who changed the way we think. Yet, fifty years after his death,
we are still making new discoveries about him

TS Eliot on Love Beach, New Providence Island, while on his honeymoon

in the Bahamas with his second wife, Valerie, in 1957. Photograph: Getty
Images
Robert Crawford
Saturday 10 January 2015 09.00 GMT

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Its 2015, the year of the Bullshit Centenary. One hundred years ago a
young immigrant poet submitted his poem The Triumph of Bullshit for
publication in a London avant-garde magazine. The editors letter
explaining his rejection of the work makes clear he decided to stick to my
naif determination to have no Words ending in -Uck, -Unt and Ugger.
Probably the word bullshit was imported from the poets native US; but
so far no one has found bullshit in print as a single word before 1915.

The young immigrant poet thought the rejection of his poem

disappointingly puritanical. He was finding it hard to get his verse into
print. Four years earlier, at the age of 22, he had completed his first
masterpiece. Though he had shown it to a few friends in the US and had
read it aloud to fellow students in England, in January 1915 it remained
unpublished. At least one editor considered it borderline insane; another
was unable to make head or tail of it. Its title was The Love Song of J
Alfred Prufrock.

This year also marks the centenary of the first publication of TS Eliots most
famous early poem. Prufrocks Love Song first appeared in the US, tucked
away towards the back of a small magazine, probably because the editor did
not greatly care for it. Two years passed before this disconcerting poem was
published in Eliots first book, but today most critics realise that it
announces the arrival in verse of English-language literary modernism.

At Harvard, where Eliot did most of his studying, there will be an exhibition
at the Houghton Library later this year to mark the centenary of Prufrocks
emergence in print. The US, long wary of Eliot as a sort of cultural traitor, is
coming to terms with its greatest poet.

cats Photograph: pr
It remains to be seen how much attention will be paid to another, more
solemn anniversary. Fifty years ago this month (after being nursed through
bouts of ill health by his shrewd second wife, Valerie, who had been his
secretary and who lived until 2012), TS Eliot died in London. He was by
then no longer a young bullshitter but the incarnation of his art form. He
was not just the most famous poet alive, but regarded (as many still regard
him) as the finest poet of the 20th century. Internationally lauded, he had
been awarded the Nobel prize, the Dante Gold Medal, the Goethe prize, the
US Medal of Freedom and the British Order of Merit. Adults knew him as
the poet not just of Prufrock, but also of The Waste Land and Four
Quartets; theatre audiences had flocked to his plays such asMurder in the
Cathedral and The Cocktail Party at the Edinburgh festival, in London and
on Broadway; at home and at school, children relished Macavity, one of
the poems from his Old Possums Book of Practical Cats, just as eagerly as
later audiences have delighted in Cats, the musical based on those poems.
On 4 February 1965 Eliots memorial service filled Westminster Abbey.
Fifty years later, difficult remains the word most people attach to his
verse. Yet we quote him: Not with a bang but a whimper, the last line of
Eliots poem The Hollow Men is among the best-known lines of modern
poetry. April is the cruellest month begins The Waste Land with
unsettling memorability; no reader forgets the strangeness of the patient
etherised upon a table at the start of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
Eliots mastery of the pliancy of language gives his poetry an insistency of
sound and image that seems ineradicable.
Yet, in writing his biography, Ive come to realise the difficulty in
reconciling the po-faced Pope of Russell Square (as the older Eliot came
to be nicknamed) with the young immigrant poet of The Triumph of
Bullshit. Was it simply that Eliot ossified as he aged? To some extent, yes,
respectability clamped him into place; but he understood imaginative
freedom. He both recognised and skewered inFour Quartets the routines of
eminent men of letters who became chairmen of many committees. As a
banker, then as a publisher, he worked at jobs where committees were de
rigueur and he accomplished his work with aplomb. Yet part of him always
sought an escape hatch, a way to elude his official self. His nephew Graham
Bruce Fletcher remembers Uncle Tom taking him as a boy to a London joke

shop in the 1960s. They bought stink bombs and let them off at the
entrance of the Bedford Hotel, not far from Eliots workplace in
Bloomsburys Russell Square. With a fit of giggles, Eliot put on a marked
turn of speed as, Macavity-like, he and his nephew sped from the scene of
the crime, Eliot twirling his walking stick in the manner of Charlie
Chaplin.

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Vivacious Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson as Eliot and HaighWood in Tom & Viv
This subversive Eliot, the stink-bombing Nobel prizewinner, takes us closer
to the young Eliot of bullshit. In the early months of 1915 the Eliot who
relished that word was living in Oxford (very pretty, but I dont like to be
dead). He had come there to further his studies in philosophy at the
university, but was longing for literary London, where he had made friends
with his fellow American poet, the energetic, incisive, and eventually
fascist-inclined Ezra Pound. Eliots parents were suspicious of their sons
wild avant-garde artistic associates, and made it clear that they expected
him to return to Harvard to become a respected professor. Eliot didnt want
that. What kept him in England, though, was less literature than love. After
knowing her for three months, he married the nervously vivacious Vivien
Haigh-Wood who was, like himself, a fine dancer, a poetry lover, a

Francophile. Both he and she were on the rebound from earlier

relationships. Their marriage, a brave risk, was a disaster for both of them.
More than half a century later, it would be caricatured, Hollywood-style, in
the movie Tom and Viv. For Eliot, as he put it in the 1960s, marriage to
Vivien brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land.
Eventually, painfully, they separated, and Vivien ended her days in a
mental institution in 1947. I love Tom, she once wrote, in a way that
destroys us both.
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To understand Eliot means coming to terms with Tom, not just with TS.
This year, it will become easier to do that not because there will be vast
exhibitions devoted to his work, but because 2015 will bring us fuller
accounts of Eliot than we have had to date. My biographys title, Young
Eliot, signals an intention to portray with detail and nuance the poet of The
Waste Land a figure who, some contend, was never young. Though this is
not an official biography (Eliot did not wish his life story to be written), I
am the first biographer who has been allowed to quote extensively from the
poets published and unpublished writings. Doing so liberally makes it
easier to realise how closely his vulnerable life and his brilliant poetry were
sometimes painfully connected.
This is a milestone year for Eliot. In the autumn Jim McCue and
Christopher Ricks will publish their long-planned edition of Eliots
collected poems the first ever edition to bring together fully the verse that
he published throughout his career and the poetry that never saw the light
of day. Some readers will be shocked to realise that among Eliots longest
works is his series of sexist, racist poems about King Bolo and his Big Black
Queen; these frat-boy poems allowed the sexually inexperienced student
Eliot to perform a sort of sexual swagger that helped him bond with his
Harvard cronies. They are, if you like, the B-side of Prufrocks love song.
Meticulous editing by Ricks and McCue promises us not just more Eliot
than we have seen before, but also more scholarly footnotes. Equally
densely annotated is the complete online prose which is being published by
Johns Hopkins University Press. Eliots graduate student papers on
German philosophy, degrees of reality and primitive ritual certainly relate
to the Unreal City and vegetation rites of The Waste Land; many readers
may feel they need the academic equivalent of satnav to figure it all out.

Eliots reputation has taken a battering in recent decades. In particular, he

has been accused of antisemitism a charge he denied. It seems to me that
there are moments in his writings both in material published and in
material he kept private that do invite this charge. There is clear evidence
that his parents shared a markedly antisemitic prejudice, and it is hard to
argue convincingly that Eliot completely outgrew this. Yet the publication
of his complete prose promises to reveal also that he was among writers
who spoke out unambiguously against Nazi persecutions; such a stance
surely accords with the opposition to totalitarian government in his 1930s
play Murder in the Cathedral. Eliot should not be regarded as a saint. Yet
nor should he be demonised nor his work reduced to any single issue. He
was sometimes wrong, repeatedly brilliant, sometimes insensitive and
misogynistic. He was both preternaturally gifted and undeniably a man of
his time.
So why does his work still matter? The reasons are hidden in plain sight
or, more accurately, in plain sound. Prufrocks opening words say it all: Let
us go then, you and I People often say that the poem begins with a
buttonholing, vernacular tone: its voice sounds as if it has just sidled up to
you. This is only half true. If the poem started by saying Lets go, it would
sound more vernacular: Let us go is slower, more stagey. If you say not
Lets go, but Let us go, youll sound less urgent, more mannered, more
self-conscious. What The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock introduces into
English poetry more intensely than ever before is an acute fusion of
modernity and self-consciousness. The modernity hits you like a snipers
bullet when you encounter that mention of a patient etherised upon a
table in the poems third line. From childhood, Eliot knew the Boston
Public Gardens that contained and still contain the weird and
wonderful-sounding Ether Monument (late 19th-century Boston was a
pioneering centre for anaesthetic surgery); but nobody until Eliot had put
such modern surgery into a love song. The wording of Let us go is subtler,
yet perhaps more profoundly impressive. Those three words initiate the
acute self-consciousness of modernist poetry in English. Every poet who
writes in English inherits that self-consciousness that has insinuated itself
into the language.

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Illustration by Kathryn Rathke
Because Eliot was a trained philosopher he wrote a Harvard PhD on
philosophy and his parents wanted him to pursue an academic career in the
subject he knew that the self in self-consciousness was unstable. The
Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock maps an unstable self. The poem
anatomises male anxieties about sex anxieties that its author knew from
experience and from inexperience; it hints, too, at how selves are
constructed not just out of actions but also out of their lack, and out of
language and reading, out of borrowed images. Prufrock, inhibitingly aware
that, however indecisive, he is neither Hamlet nor Lazarus nor Salome,
alludes (a little stagily) to all those roles. His self seems made out of role
playing, or attempted acting; and yet, freighted with irony, there is still a
sense of vulnerability and pain. Wittily, Prufrock refers to literature, to
roles, but the irony hints at hurt. As it develops, up until The Waste
Land and beyond, Eliots poetry goes on doing this, exhibiting the self as
constantly conscious of other possible and impossible selves; and
suggesting that literature is a sort of performance self-consciously built on
its earlier performances. Through allusion, quotation, echo and resonance,
modern life is presented as a repeated ritual, one we can hear more deeply
than we see it.

To a greater or lesser degree, this is still how poetry works. Its not so much
that knottily difficult poets including Geoffrey Hill and Jorie Graham
embed one resonance within another as they write, as that even poets very
different from Eliot inherit an acute self-consciousness in their language.
Poetry manifests an awareness that language in its play of sound as much
as in its denotation, its meaning spools and unspools the self. However
distinctively inflected, you can hear that in John Ashbery and in Louise
Gluck, in Jo Shapcott or in John Burnside.
Though poets in the generations that followed Eliot might have denied it,
his influence was unavoidable. In England one impact of this greatest of all
immigrant poets was a presence in the work of the most English of
poets: Philip Larkins articulation of dingy urban images and bleakly
isolated masculinity explored territory that Eliot had mapped out; Ted
Hughes, apparently so different from the poet of Prufrock, drew, like
Eliot, on the study of anthropology to help make his poems. In Scotland,
Hugh MacDiarmid was one of the first major poets to appreciate Eliots
importance and to transfer some of his insights to a different culture: TS
Eliot its a Scottish name claims A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle,
though the poet from Missouri politely rebuffed attempts to convey on him
Scottish ancestry. In Ireland, more recently, Seamus Heaney told me once
how his teachers gave him snippets of Eliots influential prose in capsule
form, to carry on to the battlefield. Heaney reacted against this. His early
bog poems are a long way from the humour of some of Eliots mudless
early poems; yet even those bog poems, as with other works by Heaney,
show the present as a repetition and reinterpretation of primitive ritual.
Such repetition obsessed Eliot, and is indicative of why, when he was
constructing The Waste Land, he responded so excitedly to
Stravinskys The Rite of Spring.

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Eliot enjoyed the primitive ceremony of Stravinskys The Rite of Spring.
Photograph: Bill Cooper
The TS Eliot of 1915 was just the sort of immigrant who today Theresa
May would like to send back to his home country. Having come to the end
of his course of study at Oxford, he was hanging around in Soho while of
no occupation. Today, though, Eliots impact is global. He was more
thoroughly educated than any other 20th-century poet he had studied a
daunting range of subjects, from Sanskrit and advanced mathematics to
Japanese Buddhism and classical Greek. While most of us in later life
screen out huge areas of our education, Eliot maintained that the artist
should be very sophisticated intellectually but also strikingly primitive.
Poetry in a complex era had to reflect, or at least refract, a sense of
complexity; yet it needed to reach back, too, to something primal, to sound
and re-sound what Eliot termed the beating of a drum. Decades later, the
remarkable Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo recognised this when, shortly
before his death in the Biafran war, he produced in Lament of the
Drums, Path of Thunder and other poems work at once distinctive and
immersed in the cadences and broken images of Eliots verse. When, in
our own era, the Australian poet Les Murray produces a poetry that
articulates both a totemistic animal presence and an awareness of 21stcentury stacked, screen-saturated lives, he inherits an understanding of
what Eliot thought poets had to do.
Eliot became a global presence remarkably quickly. The Waste Land in
particular made an impression on cultures very different from St Louis,
Boston, Paris and London the cities that shaped him most. In England,
the 27-year-old Japanese poet Nishiwaki Junzabur read it as soon as it
appeared in 1922. Nishiwaki carried its influence back to Japan where
reference to Aprils suffering marked a recasting of The Waste Lands
opening words; after Hiroshima it made all too much sense for poet Nobuo
Ayukawa to contend that the modern world had become a waste land.
Much of The Waste Land was written during the aftermath of the first
world war. In Europe the poem was heard less as Eliots mixture of
rhythmic grumbling and cri de coeur (which it was) and more as a lament
for modern European civilisation. In Asia, though, the poem offered

metaphors for quite different national catastrophes. Just days after she
published the first full Chinese translation of The Waste Land in June 1937,
Zhao Luori saw the catastrophic second Sino-Japanese war break out.
Suddenly her translation could be seen to articulate modern Chinese
cultural and political trauma. As the 21st-century scholar Lihui Liu argues:
The terrible situation of the 1930s moved some young Chinese poets to
identify Eliot as virtually their spokesman.
Eliots profound but unsettling interrogation of ideas of tradition also
struck and still strikes a deep chord with China. Tradition and the
Individual Talent was the first of his works to be translated there. Mid20th-century Chinese poets who engaged with Eliots work were fascinated
by continuity and disruption in their own, and other, cultural histories. So,
when I met the influential poet-critic Yuan Kezia in 1986, he was visiting
Britain as a poet and translator of modernist literature and as someone to
whom Eliots work had mattered a good deal; yet he was also, as he made
sure to tell me, the translator of Burns. To English readers, it may seem
strange to connect Robert Burns and TS Eliot; yet to Scottish or Chinese
readers the juxtaposition can make sense: both these poets are traditionbearers whose ideas blended continuity and disruption, fusing modern
literary culture with oral heritage. Some of the most powerful lines in
Eliots work, after all, come from nursery rhymes whether The Waste
Lands London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down (a telling
line in a poem obsessed with loss of connection), or that distorted nursery
rhyme beginning Here we go round the prickly pear in The Hollow
Men.
Eliots work, and not least The Waste Land, resonates on every continent.
In South America, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a significant essay on La
eternidad y TS Eliot, while the 21st-century Mexican poet and critic Pedro
Serrano likes to align Eliot with one of his most important Mexican readers,
the great poet Octavio Paz. In Eliots native land, Christopher Ricks has
argued that Eliot has affinities with a poet of a later generation, Anthony
Hecht. Having perforated the refined polite mask of Bostonian society,
Eliot himself admired the poetry of a quite different New Englander, Robert
Lowell, whose Life Studies managed to articulate in verse something that
Eliot could not quite capture in his own greatest poetry familial love.

Eliot is a great love poet, but his sense repeatedly is of love frustrated, lost
or gone wrong. Few poets have dealt so profoundly with the themes of
childlessness, of longing, of ageing. Eliot remains one of the greatest
religious poets in the language, and that, too, has added to his global reach
as well as enriching his adopted and adapted European sensibility. In
Greece George Seferis recast Eliot and learned how to fuse (as Eliot does) a
feeling for urban modernity with a deep love of the sea. From his childhood,
Eliot contemplated the Atlantic Ocean and knew what it meant to face up to
death. In boyhood he had lived through a cyclone that destroyed much of
his native St Louis; the poet of Death by Water was also a young man who
had risked his life at sea. In Italy, while it was it was Mario Luzi who recast
Eliots most beautiful maritime poem of loss and longing, Marina, as a
new poem in Italian, it is the Nobel prizewinning Eugenio Montale, a
presenter of desolate landscapes and an interrogator of past literary
tradition, who is often seen as a kindred spirit to Eliot. Yet there may be an
affinity, too, between the poet of The Waste Land and that much younger,
Dresden-born poet Durs Grnbein who, like Eliot, hauls back from the
world of the Greek and Latin Classics material that resonates with the worst
horrors of the 20th century.
In English, Eliot, the greatest poet of London, is also the greatest poet of the
second world war not because he fought in it, but because he registered so
fully its struggle and destruction: the houses that turned to dust, the raids,
the need to persist against wholly unfavourable odds. Those are some of the
elements that power East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding.
The last named of the Quartets in particular draws on Eliots experience as
a fire watcher during the London blitz, while The Dry Salvages, drawing
on and addressing his own American past, was written in the period before
America entered the second world war and as Britain was facing defeat.
Though in no way directly propagandistic, Eliots poem nonetheless seems
geared to encourage Americans to understand the necessity of persisting in
struggle. After the second world war, as after the first, Eliot went out of his
way to voice his Europhilia, his belief in European unity and the mind of
Europe. All this contributed to his being regarded, rightly, as an
Anglophile poet who could contend at one moment that History is now
and England, but who could see, too, the importance of a sense of panEuropean civilisation. So, in the decades after 1945, the importance of this
poet to whom Dante mattered as much as Shakespeare can be seen as

emblematising European cultural politics. There is a European Eliot, an

English Eliot, an American Eliot, an Indian Eliot, a Chinese Eliot: this
proliferation of Eliots has made him all the more a world poet.
So when, on Monday in London, the Poetry Book Society and the TS Eliot
Trustees host a group of contemporary poets for the TS Eliot prize award
ceremony, honouring the best collection of poetry published in 2014 at an
event marking the 50th anniversary of TS Eliots death, whether or not the
winning poet echoes Eliot directly is immaterial. More than any other 20thcentury poet, Eliot showed how to balance tradition and modernity that is
his true legacy; as poet, publisher, critic and editor, his art opened up the
space in which we write and read. Sometimes people try to caricature him;
his detractors must grant him his full complexity, just as his fans must
acknowledge that his background was not just one of ragtime and high
culture but also of familial antisemitism and attitudes to race that trouble
St Louis to this day. To appreciate him requires an acknowledgement that
his life and work were full of daring, astuteness and a preternaturally acute
ear for language. Anything else is bullshit.
Robert Crawfords biography Young Eliot: From St Louis to The Waste
Land is published by Cape on 5 February.

TS Eliot

Poetry

TS Eliot prize for poetry

Biography