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born and raised in St. Louis Missouri
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family was Unitarian
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1906 entered Harvard
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B.A., M.A. philosophy
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wrote Ph.D. thesis on philosophy of F.H. Bradley; degree
incomplete
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1914 – studied in Germany, Sorbonne, Oxford
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settled in London; meets Ezra Pound
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married Vivien Haigh-Wood 1915 – early 1930s
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occupations included teaching, book reviews for TLS;
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Foreign department of Lloyd’s Bank from 1917
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assist. editor at the Egoist, editor for The
Criterion (1922-1939)
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Levenson: Pound as provocateur, Eliot as consolidator
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conscious effort to explain the modernist project
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director of publishing for Faber and Faber
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1948 Order of Merit and Nobel Prize
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married Valerie Fletcher 1957
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critic, essayist, dramatist, poet
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1917 Prufrock and Other Observations pub. by
Harriet Shaw Weaver
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1919 Poems Hogarth Press (Leonard and Virginia Woolf)
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1920 Ara Vos Prec
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1922 The Waste Land pub. in inaugural issue of The
Criterion
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1927 – conversion to Anglicanism and becomes British citizen
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Four Quartets: (pub. as whole 1943)
Context for The Waste
Land
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1890 The Golden Bough - Sir James Frazer– cross
cultural study of fertility myths ·
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1903 Prologemena to the Study of Greek Religion –
Jane Harrison ·
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1920 From Ritual to Romance - Jessie L. Weston
"In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous
parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method
which others must pursue after him. They will not be imitators, any more that
the scientist who uses the discoveries of an Einstein in pursuing his own,
independent, further investigations. It is simply a way of controlling, or
ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history....Instead of narrative
method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step
toward making the modern world possible for art...." (Ulysses, Order, and
Myth).
"Even The Golden Bough can be read in two ways:
as a collection of entertaining myths, or as a revelation of that vanished
mind of which our mind is a continuation” (The Rite of Spring and The
Golden Bough).
"The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art
is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, a set
of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that
particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate
in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (Hamlet).
Publication History
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began work 1921; wrote most of poem in Lausanne while on 3
month rest leave from Lloyds
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met with Ezra Pound; Eliot claimed Pound reduced poem by
"about half its size"; Pound and Eliot often read one another's work
(see letters)
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poem first pub. in The Criterion (U.K.) and The Dial (U.S.)
in October 1922
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Eliot relied on Pound to help him market the poem - avoided
Vanity Fair magazine, lobbied for more money; Thayer, the editor of The Dial,
bought the poem without having read it (Rainey)
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Pound marketed poem as "justification of the
'movement,' of our modern experiment since 1900" and later wrote that The
Waste Land was "as good in its way as Ulysses in its way";
conscious effort to establish Eliot as the poetic Joyce
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Eliot wanted a bound version; contract with Boni and
Liveright to publish poem as book with Eliot's notes; Hogarth Press also pub.
limited edition of 460 copies
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Eliot received "$150 as the price of the poem proper,
$2000 for The Dial Award, a subsequent $580.28 in royalities on the sales
of the Liveright edition, and perhaps another L20 [20 pounds] from the Hogarth
Press edition - altogether about $2800, a figure that in modern terms would
surely be somewhere between $45,000 and $55,000. (It was 2.5 times the $1,150
per annum earned by the executive secretary to the editor of Vanity Fair)"
(Rainey, The Price of Modernism).