T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot

Society can be described in many ways, happy, enthusiastic, open, judging... and in some cases, like T.S. Eliot’s, pessimistic and dead. Said to be one of the best 20th century poets if not the most important T.S. Eliot was highly influenced by many tragic political and personal events such as WWI, or his own personal life, which led him to write poems like “The Waste Land,” Eliot's most famous work, or its "sequel" “The Hollow Men” in which Eliot expresses his perspective on the "wasted" society of his time through different themes, symbols, and allusions to other literary works.

T.S. Eliot was a poet that lived a life full of change and in some cases disgrace. Eliot was born in the 1880s in St. Louis Missouri (Murphy 3). After his studies at Harvard Eliot lived in Paris for about a year, and later moved to London. WWI, which broke out in 1914, would take approximately 20 million people. Eliot also lost an old friend from Paris in WWI (Bush). In 1915, during WWI he married Vivien Haigh-Wood. The unexpected marriage and migration of Eliot caused multiple family disputes which would result in violent outbreaks from Eliot (Murphy 7). During one of these outbreaks, Eliot would write most of “The Wasted Land” which would become his pass to the fame. He would later publish "The Hollow Land,” otherwise known as "The Waste Land's sequel"(Murphy 6). As the years passed the marriage deteriorated. Vivien’s mental and physical health deteriorated as well. In the 1930s Eliot secluded himself from Vivien even though she tried reconciliation many times. Vivien was sent by her family to a mental facility in 1938 due to her mental health state, where she would die of a heart attack in 1947 (Bush). Eliot married again later in his lif...

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...ote most of “The Waste Land” while recovering from a mental breakdown which he experienced during one of his multiple family fights with his family.

In conclusion, Thomas Stearns Eliot was a well-known poet influenced by both political and personal events whose famous modernist poems “The Hollow Men” and “The Waste Land” led him to fame because of their themes that reflected the broken society Eliot lived in after WWI. In my opinion, T.S. Eliot’s message is that society should never be this “dead” and “hollow,” and that we should never let this kind of depression dominate society once again. We should appreciate the fact that today, in some parts of the world, we live a “happy” life, but at the same time, notice that even though we are in peace there is still some places in the world where the desire to live is miniscule and that we should fix it or prevent it.