T.S. Eliot (1888–1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, educated at Harvard and Oxford, and settled in London in 1914, where he remained for the rest of his life — a permanently displaced American who became the most influential English-language poet of the twentieth century, which was itself a kind of peripheral becoming central.

The Waste Land (1922) is a poem built from fragments: quotations in six languages, half-finished narratives, voices without bodies, scenes that begin and do not end. It does not explain its own structure. It does not offer the reader a position of comfort or authority. It insists that fragmentation is not a failure of form but a form — the form appropriate to a civilisation that had just sent ten million men to die in the mud of Belgium and France and was now trying to pretend it knew what it was.

His Nobel Prize in 1948 was awarded for "outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He is introduced briefly in Chapter Two of this course as the limit of what Year One can hold. He belongs here, in the chapter about what language does when it stops pretending to be whole.

He gave no Nobel Lecture. At the banquet (1948) he confessed: "my business is with words, yet the words were beyond my command." Read the speech at NobelPrize.org.