Ts eliot biography powerpoint presentation

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T. S. Eliot 1888-1965 presentation by Bethany Jones

Background • Thomas Stearns Eliot was born to a prominent family in St. Louis, Missouri. • “having passed one’s childhood beside the big river” influenced his poetry. • He earned his master’s degree at Harvard.

eliot’s work 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations 1922 The Waste Land 1925 Poems 1909-1925 1930 Ash-Wednesday 1963 Collected Poems 1909-1962

The Waste Land was T.S. Eliot’s first major philosophical work. Critics’ opinions of it still vary wildly, though it has been generally accepted that The Waste Land is a very important and influential work. It has been interpreted in many different ways. Some see it as the Grail legend in a modern setting. Eliot himself says he is in debt to Sir James Frazer and Jessie L. Weston for their book From Ritual to Romance, a story of the Grail legend as the surviving record of an initiation ritual.

Other literary critics have suggest theories as to who the narrator is. In some parts of the poem, the narrator identifies himself as Tiresias, a blind prophet in Greek myth [prominent in the play Oedipus Rex by Sophocles]. Some of the references in the poem lead others to say that Eliot is speaking through Ulysses, the Latin equivalent of the Greek Odyss

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T.S. Eliot English 11 Honors

T.S. Eliot Biography • T.S. = Thomas Stearns Eliot • Born in St. Louis, Missouri (1888) • Graduated from Harvard University • Just before WWI he left the U.S. to live in London. • Friend and contemporary of Ezra Pound • Pound called Eliot “Possum” • Died in 1965

Complex Poetry for a Complex World • Has a taste for classical literature • Influenced by the late 19th century French poets (Symbolism) • Portrays the emotional effects that objects suggest • Poetry is an art of recreating states of mind and feeling • “Poetry had to be complex to express the complexities of modern life.” – T.S. Eliot

Eliot Believes… • His poetry draws on a wide range of cultural reference to depict a modern world that is in ruins yet somehow beautiful and deeply meaningful. • As Ezra Pound once famously said, Eliot truly did “modernize himself.” • In addition to showcasing a variety of poetic innovations, Eliot’s early poetry also develops a series of characters who fit the type of the modern man as described by Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and others of Eliot’s contemporaries.

T. S. Eliot Believes… • The Waste Landin 1922, now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century. It takes on the degraded me