Rudyard Kipling - Biography and Publications

The Life of Rudyard Kipling:

The Poetry Foundation - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/rudyard-kipling

Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudyard_Kipling

[From Wikipedia] Joseph Rudyard Kipling ( /ˈrʌdjəd ˈkɪplɪŋ/ rud-yəd kip-ling; 30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature. He was born in Bombay, in the Bombay Presidency of British India, and was taken by his family to England when he was five years old. Kipling is best known for his works of fiction, including The Jungle Book(a collection of stories which includes "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi"), Just So Stories (1902) (1894), Kim (1901) (a tale of adventure), many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888); and his poems, including Mandalay (1890), Gunga Din (1890), The White Man's Burden (1899) and If— (1910). He is regarded as a major "innovator in the art of the short story"; his children's books are enduring classics of children's literature; and his best works are said to exhibit "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".

Kipling was one of the most popular writers in England, in both prose and verse, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Henry James said: "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius (as distinct from fine intelligence) that I have ever known." In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and to date he remains its youngest recipient. Among other honours, he was sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and on several occasions for a knighthood, all of which he declined.

Kipling's subsequent reputation has changed according to the political and social climate of the age and the resulting contrasting views about him continued for much of the 20th century. George Orwell called him a "prophet of British imperialism". Literary critic Douglas Kerr wrote: "He [Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognised as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with."

Chronology of Rudyard Kipling http://ptmrot.com/KIPLING3/
	1865 Born in Bombay, where his father was a Professor of Architectural Sculpture at the Bombay School of Art.   1870 Rudyard and his younger sister are taken to England by his parents and placed in Calvinistic foster home were he is nagged, bullied and beaten. 1876 Rudyard's mother returns to England and discovers the mistreatment that her children had endured. Rudyard is removed from the foster home and he is sent to a private school called the United Services College.
1881 Schoolboy Lyrics published. 1882 Rudyard leaves school to return to India. His father, who was then the curator of the museum at Lahore, gets him a job as assistant editor of the English paper, The Civil and Military Gazette, which was published in that city. 1886 Departmental Ditties is published. 1887 After five years as sub-editor of the Civil and Military Gazette, Rudyard is sent to Allahabad, several hundred miles to the south, to work on the much more important sister-paper, The Pioneer. The proprietors were starting a weekly edition for home, and he was given the editorship. He publishes Soldier Tales, Indian Tales, and Tales of the Opposite Sex. Among them were such powerful and grusome stories as The Mark of the Beast and The Return of Imray. 1888 Publishes Plain Tales from the Hills his first work which explores the psychological and moral problems of the Anglo-Indians and their relationship with the people they had colonized. Also published are: Soldiers Three, The Story of the Gadsbys, In Black and White, Wee Wee Willie Winkie and Turn overs from "The Civil and Military Gazette"
1889 Rudyard leaves India for England and settles down in Villiers Street, Strand. 1890 The Courting of Dinah Shadd and Other Stories and The City of Dreadful Night are published. 1891 The Light that Failed, Letters of Marque and Life's Handicap are published. 1892 Barrack-Room Ballads, Rhymed Chapter Headings and The Naulahka are published. Rudyard marries Carolyn Balestier, the sister of Wolcott Balestier, who is an American. Because of his health breaking down, Rudyard and his wife settle down in Brattleboro, Vermont where his wife's family had long been established. Kipling's India (click to enlarge) 1893 Many Inventions is published. 1894 The Jungle Book is published. 1895 The Second Jungle Book is published. 1896 The Seven Seas and Soldier Tales is published. 1897 After a violent arguement with his in-laws, Rudyard and his wife move back to England and settles on a country estate. Captains Courageous is published. 1898 An Almanac of Twelve Sports,The Day's Work and A Fleet in Being are published. 1899 Rudyard goes to South Africa, in the midst of the defeats of the Boer War. His eldest daughter Josephine dies of measles. Stalky and Co. and From Sea to Sea are published. 1900 The Kipling Reader is published. 1901 Kim and War's Brighter Side are published. 1902 Just So Stories is published. 1903 The Five Nations is published. 1904 Traffics and Discoveries is published. 1906 Puck of Pook's Hill is published. 1907 Collected Verse is published. Rudyard Kipling becomes the first English author to recieve the Nobel Prize for Literature. 1909 Actions and Reactions is published. 1910 Rewards and Fairies is published. 1911 A History of England is published. Kipling's England (click to enlarge) 1912 Collected Verse (British edition) and Songs from Books is published. 1914 Rudyard emerges from seclusion as the official writer-up of the new armed forces of the Crown. 1915 The New Army in Training and France in War are published. "Mary Postgate." 1916 Rudyard's son is killed with the Irish Guards. Sea Warfare is published. 1917 A Diversity of Creatures is published. 1919 The Graves of the Fallen and The Years Between are published. 1920 Horace Odes, Book V and Letters of Travel are published. 1923 Elected Lord Rector of St. Andrews University. The Irish Guards in the Great War and Land and Sea are published. 1924 Songs for Youth is published. 1926 Sea and Sussex and Debits and Credits are published. 1927 Songs of the Sea is published. 1928 A Book of Words is published. 1929 Poems, 1886-1929 is published. 1930 Thy Servant A Dog is published. 1932 Limits and Renewals is published. 1934 Collected Dog Stories is published. 1936 January 18th Rudyard Kipling dies of a perforated duodenum. Authorial Progress of Kipling http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/rudyard-kipling Career Poet, essayist, novelist, journalist, and writer of short stories. Worked as a journalist for Civil and Military Gazette, Lahore, India, 1882-89; assistant editor and overseas correspondent for the Allahabad Pioneer, Allahabad, India, 1887-89; associate editor and correspondent for The Friend, Bloemfontein, South Africa, 1900, covering the Boer War. Rector of University of St. Andrews, 1922- 25. Bibliography POETRY Schoolboy Lyrics, privately printed, 1881. (With sister, Beatrice Kipling) Echoes: By Two Writers, Civil and Military Gazette Press (Lahore), 1884. Departmental Ditties and Other Verses, Civil and Military Gazette Press, 1886, 2nd edition, enlarged, Thacker, Spink (Calcutta), 1886, 3rd edition, further enlarged, 1888, 4th edition, still further enlarged, W. Thacker (London), 1890, deluxe edition, 1898. Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (contains the fifty poems of the fourth edition of Departmental Ditties and Other Verses and seventeen new poems later published as Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads), United States Book Co., 1890, revised edition published as Departmental Ditties and Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, Doubleday McClure, 1899. Ballads and Barrack-Room Ballads, Macmillan, 1892, new edition, with additional poems, 1893, published as The Complete Barrack-Room Ballads of Rudyard Kipling, edited by Charles Carrington, Methuen, 1973, reprint published as Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses, White Rose Press, 1987. The Rhyme of True Thomas, D. Appleton, 1894. The Seven Seas, D. Appleton, 1896, reprinted, Longwood Publishing Group, 1978. Recessional (Victorian ode in commemoration of Queen Victoria's Jubilee), M. F. Mansfield, 1897. Mandalay, drawings by Blanche McManus, M. F. Mansfield, 1898, reprinted, Doubleday, Page, 1921. The Betrothed, drawings by McManus, M. F. Mansfield and A. Wessells, 1899. Poems, Ballads, and Other Verses, illustrations by V. Searles, H. M. Caldwell, 1899. Belts, A. Grosset, 1899. Cruisers, Doubleday McClure, 1899. The Reformer, Doubleday, Page, 1901. The Lesson, Doubleday, Page, 1901. The Five Nations, Doubleday, Page, 1903. The Muse among the Motors, Doubleday, Page, 1904. The Sons of Martha, Doubleday, Page, 1907. The City of Brass, Doubleday, Page, 1909. Cuckoo Song, Doubleday, Page, 1909. A Patrol Song, Doubleday, Page, 1909. A Song of the English, illustrations by W. Heath Robinson, Doubleday, Page, 1909. If, Doubleday, Page, 1910, reprinted, Doubleday, 1959. The Declaration of London, Doubleday, Page, 1911. The Spies' March, Doubleday, Page, 1911. Three Poems (contains The River's Tale, The Roman Centurion Speaks, and The Pirates in England), Doubleday, Page, 1911. Songs from Books, Doubleday, Page, 1912. An Unrecorded Trial, Doubleday, Page, 1913. For All We Have and Are, Methuen, 1914. The Children's Song, Macmillan, 1914. A Nativity, Doubleday, Page, 1917. A Pilgrim's Way, Doubleday, Page, 1918. The Supports, Doubleday, Page, 1919. The Years Between, Doubleday, Page, 1919. The Gods of the Copybook Headings, Doubleday, Page, 1919, reprinted, 1921. The Scholars, Doubleday, Page, 1919. Great-Heart, Doubleday, Page, 1919. Danny Deever, Doubleday, Page, 1921. The King's Pilgrimage, Doubleday, Page, 1922. Chartres Windows, Doubleday, Page, 1925. A Choice of Songs, Doubleday, Page, 1925. Sea and Sussex, with an introductory poem by the author and illustrations by Donald Maxwell, Doubleday, Page, 1926. A Rector's Memory, Doubleday, Page, 1926. Supplication of the Black Aberdeen, illustrations by G. L. Stampa, Doubleday, Doran, 1929. The Church That Was at Antioch, Doubleday, Doran, 1929. The Tender Achilles, Doubleday, Doran, 1929. Unprofessional, Doubleday, Page, 1930. The Day of the Dead, Doubleday, Doran, 1930. Neighbours, Doubleday, Doran, 1932. The Storm Cone, Doubleday, Doran, 1932. His Apologies, illustrations by Cecil Aldin, Doubleday, Doran, 1932. The Fox Meditates, Doubleday, Doran, 1933. To the Companions, Doubleday, Doran, 1933. Bonfires on the Ice, Doubleday, Doran, 1933. Our Lady of the Sackcloth, Doubleday, Doran, 1935. Hymn of the Breaking Strain, Doubleday, Doran, 1935. Doctors, The Waster, The Flight, Cain and Abel, [and] The Appeal, Doubleday, Doran, 1939. A Choice of Kipling's Verse, selected and introduced by T. S. Eliot, Faber, 1941, Scribner, 1943. B.E.L., Doubleday, Doran, 1944. Poems of Rudyard Kipling, Avenel, 1995. SHORT STORIES In Black and White, A. H. Wheeler (Allahabad), 1888, 1st American edition, Lovell, 1890. Plain Tales from the Hills, Thacker, Spink, 1888 , 2nd edition, revised, 1889, 1st English edition, revised, Macmillan, 1890, 1st American edition, revised, Doubleday McClure, 1899, reprint edited by H. R. Woudhuysen, Penguin, 1987. The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Tales, A. H. Wheeler, 1888, revised edition, 1890, reprinted, Hurst, 1901. The Story of the Gadsbys: A Tale With No Plot, A. H. Wheeler, 1888, 1st American edition, Lovell, 1890. Soldiers Three: A Collection of Stories Setting Forth Certain Passages in the Lives and Adventures of Privates Terence Mulvaney, Stanley Ortheris, and John Learoyd, A. H. Wheeler, 1888, 1st American edition, revised, Lovell, 1890, reprinted, Belmont, 1962. Under the Deodars, A. H. Wheeler, 1888, 1st American edition, enlarged, Lovell, 1890. The Courting of Dinah Shadd and Other Stories, with a biographical and critical sketch by Andrew Lang, Harper, 1890, reprinted, Books for Libraries, 1971. His Private Honour, Macmillan, 1891. The Smith Administration, A. H. Wheeler, 1891. Mine Own People, introduction by Henry James, United States Book Co., 1891. Many Inventions, D. Appleton, 1893, reprinted, Macmillan, 1982. Mulvaney Stories, 1897, reprinted, Books for Libraries, 1971. The Day's Work, Doubleday McClure, 1898, reprinted, Books for Libraries, 1971, reprinted with introduction by Constantine Phipps, Penguin, 1988. The Drums of the Fore and Aft, illustrations by L. J. Bridgman, Brentano's, 1898. The Man Who Would Be King, Brentano's, 1898. Black Jack, F. T. Neely, 1899. Without Benefit of Clergy, Doubleday McClure, 1899. The Brushwood Boy, illustrations by Orson Lowell, Doubleday & McClure, 1899, reprinted, with illustrations by F. H. Townsend, Doubleday, Page, 1907. Railway Reform in Great Britain, Doubleday, Page, 1901. Traffics and Discoveries, Doubleday, Page, 1904, reprinted, Penguin, 1987. They, Scribner, 1904. Abaft the Funnel, Doubleday, Page, 1909. Actions and Reactions, Doubleday, Page, 1909. A Diversity of Creatures, Doubleday, Page, 1917, reprinted, Macmillan, 1966, reprinted, Penguin, 1994. "The Finest Story in the World" and Other Stories, Little Leather Library, 1918. Debits and Credits, Doubleday, Page, 1926, reprinted, Macmillan, 1965. Thy Servant a Dog, Told by Boots, illustrations by Marguerite Kirmse, Doubleday, Doran, 1930. Beauty Spots, Doubleday, Doran, 1931. Limits and Renewals, Doubleday, Doran, 1932. The Pleasure Cruise, Doubleday, Doran, 1933. Collected Dog Stories, illustrations by Kirmse, Doubleday, Doran, 1934. Ham and the Porcupine, Doubleday, Doran, 1935. Teem: A Treasure-Hunter, Doubleday, Doran, 1935. The Maltese Cat: A Polo Game of the 'Nineties, illustrations by Lionel Edwards, Doubleday, Doran, 1936. "Thy Servant a Dog" and Other Dog Stories, illustrations by G. L. Stampa, Macmillan, 1938, reprinted, 1982. Their Lawful Occasions, White Rose Press, 1987. John Brunner Presents Kipling's Science Fiction: Stories, T. Doherty Associates (New York, NY), 1992. John Brunner Presents Kipling's Fantasy: Stories, T. Doherty Associates (New York, NY), 1992. The Man Who Would Be King, and Other Stories, Dover, 1994. The Science Fiction Stories of Rudyard Kipling, Carol, 1994. Collected Stories, edited by John Brunner, Knopf, 1994. The Works of Rudyard Kipling, Longmeadow Press, 1995. The Haunting of Holmescraft, Books of Wonder (New York, NY), 1998. The Mark of the Beast, and Other Horror Tales, Dover Publications (Mineola, NY), 2000. The Metaphysical Kipling, Aeon (Mamaroneck, NY), 2000. L. L. Owens, Tales of Rudyard Kipling: Retold Timeless Classics, Perfection Learning (Logan, IA), 2000. Craig Raine, editor and author of introduction, Selected Stories of Rudyard Kipling, Modern Library (New York, NY), 2002. NOVELS The Light That Failed, J. B. Lippincott, 1891, revised edition, Macmillan, 1891, reprinted, Penguin, 1988. (With Wolcott Balestier) The Naulahka: A Story of West and East, Macmillan, 1892, reprinted, Doubleday, Page, 1925. Kim, illustrations by father, J. Lockwood Kipling, Doubleday, Page, 1901, new edition, with illustrations by Stuart Tresilian, Macmillan, 1958, reprinted, with introduction by Alan Sandison, Oxford University Press, 1987. CHILDREN'S BOOKS "Wee Willie Winkie" and Other Child Stories, A. H. Wheeler, 1888, 1st American edition, Lovell, 1890, reprinted, Penguin, 1988. The Jungle Book (short stories and poems; also see below), illustrations by John Lockwood Kipling, W. H. Drake, and P. Frenzeny, Macmillan, 1894, adapted and abridged by Anne L. Nelan, with illustrations by Earl Thollander, Fearon, 1967 , reprinted, with illustrations by John Lockwood Kipling and Drake, Macmillan, 1982, adapted by G. C. Barrett, with illustrations by Don Daily, Courage Books, 1994, reprinted, with illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg, Grosset Dunlap, 1995, reprinted, with illustrations by Kurt Wiese, Knopf, 1994. The Second Jungle Book (short stories and poems), illustrations by John Lockwood Kipling, Century Co., 1895, reprinted, Macmillan, 1982. "Captains Courageous": A Story of the Grand Banks, Century Co., 1897, abridged edition, illustrated by Rafaello Busoni, Hart Publishing, 1960, reprinted, with an afterword by C. A. Bodelsen, New American Library, 1981, reprinted, Oxford University Press, 1995. Stalky Co. (short stories), Doubleday McClure, 1899, reprinted, Bantam, 1985, new and abridged edition, Pendulum Press, 1977. Just So Stories for Little Children (short stories and poems), illustrations by the author, Doubleday, Page, 1902, reprinted, Silver Burdett, 1986, revised edition, edited by Lisa Lewis, Oxford University Press, 1995, reprinted, with illustrations by Barry Moser, Books of Wonder, 1996. Puck of Pook's Hill (short stories and poems), Doubleday, 1906, reprinted, New American Library, 1988. Rewards and Fairies (short stories and poems), illustrations by Frank Craig, Doubleday, Page, 1910, revised edition, with illustrations by Charles E. Brock, Macmillan, 1926, reprinted, Penguin, 1988. Toomai of the Elephants, Macmillan, 1937. The Miracle of Purun Bhagat, Creative Education, 1985. Gunga Din, Harcourt, 1987. Mowgli Stories from "The Jungle Book," illustrated by Thea Kliros, Dover, 1994. The Elephant's Child, illustrated by John A. Rowe, North-South Books, 1995. The Beginning of the Armadillos, illustrated by John A. Rowe, North-South Books, 1995. Thomas Pinney, editor and author of introduction, The Jungle Play, Allen Lane/Penguin Press (New York, NY), 2000. How the Camel Got His Hump, North-South Books (New York, NY), 2001. The Classic Tale of the Jungle Book: A Young Reader's Edition of the Classic Story, Courage Books (Philadelphia, PA), 2003. TRAVEL WRITINGS Letters of Marque (also see below), A. H. Wheeler, 1891. American Notes, M. J. Ivers, 1891, reprinted, Ayer Co., 1974, revised edition published as American Notes: Rudyard Kipling's West, University of Oklahoma Press, 1981. From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches, two volumes, Doubleday & McClure, 1899, published as one volume, Doubleday, Page, 1909, reprinted, 1925. Letters to the Family: Notes on a Recent Trip to Canada, Macmillan of Canada, 1908. Letters of Travel, 1892-1913, Doubleday, Page, 1920. Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides, Macmillan (London), 1923, published as Land and Sea Tales for Boys and Girls, Doubleday, Page, 1923. Souvenirs of France, Macmillan, 1933. Brazilian Sketches, Doubleday, Doran, 1940. Letters from Japan, edited with an introduction and notes by Donald Richie and Yoshimori Harashima, Kenkyusha, 1962. NAVAL AND MILITARY WRITINGS A Fleet in Being: Notes of Two Trips With the Channel Squadron, Macmillan, 1899. The Army of a Dream, Doubleday, Page, 1904, reprinted, White Rose Press, 1987. The New Army, Doubleday, Page, 1914. The Fringes of the Fleet, Doubleday, Page, 1915. France at War: On the Frontier of Civilization, Doubleday, Page, 1915. Sea Warfare, Macmillan, 1916, Doubleday, Page, 1917. Tales of "The Trade," Doubleday, Page, 1916. The Eyes of Asia, Doubleday, Page, 1918. The Irish Guards, Doubleday, Page, 1918. The Graves of the Fallen, Imperial War Graves Commission, 1919. The Feet of the Young Men, photographs by Lewis R. Freeman, Doubleday, Page, 1920. The Irish Guards in the Great War: Edited and Compiled from Their Diaries and Papers, two volumes, Doubleday, Page, 1923, Volume I: The First Battalion, Volume II: The Second Battalion and Appendices. OTHER The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places (articles; also see below), A. H. Wheeler, 1891. Out of India: Things I Saw, and Failed to See, in Certain Days and Nights at Jeypore and Elsewhere (includes The City of Dreadful Night and Other Places and Letters of Marque), Dillingham, 1895. (With Charles R. L. Fletcher) A History of England, Doubleday, Page, 1911, published as Kipling's Pocket History of England, with illustrations by Henry Ford, Greenwich, 1983. How Shakespeare Came to Write "The Tempest," introduction by Ashley H. Thorndike, Dramatic Museum of Columbia University, 1916. London Town: November 11, 1918-1923, Doubleday, Page, 1923. The Art of Fiction, J. A. Allen, 1926. A Book of Words: Selections from Speeches and Addresses Delivered between 1906 and 1927, Doubleday, Doran, 1928. Mary Kingsley, Doubleday, Doran, 1932. Proofs of Holy Writ, Doubleday, Doran, 1934. Something of Myself for My Friends Known and Unknown (autobiography), Doubleday, Doran, 1937, reprinted, Penguin Classics, 1989. Rudyard Kipling to Rider Haggard: The Record of a Friendship, edited by Morton Cohen, Hutchinson, 1965. The Portable Kipling, edited by Irving Howe, Viking, 1982. "O Beloved Kids": Rudyard Kipling's Letters to His Children, selected and edited by Elliot L. Gilbert, Harcourt, 1984. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vols. 1-3, edited by Thomas Pinney, University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 1990. Writings of Literature by Rudyard Kipling, edited by Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Writings on Writing, edited by Kemp and Lewis, Cambridge University Press, 1996. Also author of The Harbor Watch (one-act play; unpublished), 1913, and The Return of Imray (play; unpublished), 1914. Many of Kipling's works first appeared in periodicals, including four Anglo-Indian newspapers, the Civil and Military Gazette, the Pioneer, Pioneer News, Week's News; the Scots Observer and its successor, the National Observer; London Morning Post, the London Times, the English Illustrated Magazine, Macmillan's Magazine, McClure's Magazine, Pearson's Magazine, Spectator, Atlantic, Ladies' Home Journal, and Harper's Weekly. The recently discovered short story "Scylla and Charybdis" was published in the Spring, 2004 issue of the Kipling Society Journal. His works are collected in more than one hundred omnibus volumes. Collections of his papers may be found in many libraries, including the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, and the Pierpoint Morgan Library.

John Keats - Biography

John Keats, 1795-1821

http://www.online-literature.com/keats/

Biography written by C. D. Merriman for Jalic Inc.

Copyright Jalic Inc. 2007. All Rights Reserved.


John Keats (1795-1821), renowned poet of the English Romantic Movement, wrote some of the greatest English language poems including "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", "Ode To A Nightingale", and "Ode On a Grecian Urn":

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 in Moorgate, London, England, the first child born to Frances Jennings (b.1775-d.1810) and Thomas Keats (d.1804), an employee of a livery stable. He had three siblings: George (1797-1841), Thomas (1799-1818), and Frances Mary "Fanny" (1803-1889). After leaving school in Enfield, Keats went on to apprentice with Dr. Hammond, a surgeon in Edmonton. After his father died in a riding accident, and his mother died of tuberculosis, John and his brothers moved to Hampstead. It was here that Keats met Charles Armitage Brown (1787-1842) who would become a great friend. Remembering his first meeting with him, Brown writes "His full fine eyes were lustrously intellectual, and beaming (at that time!)". Much grieved by his death, Brown worked for many years on his memoir and biography, Life of John Keats (1841). In it Brown claims that it was not until Keats read Edmund Spencer's Faery Queen that he realised his own gift for the poetic. Keats was an avid student in the fields of medicine and natural history, but he then turned his attentions to the literary works of such authors as William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer.

Keats had his poems published in the magazines of the day at the encouragement of many including James Henry Leigh Hunt Esq. (1784-1859), editor of the Examiner and to whom Keats dedicated his first collection Poems (1817). It includes "To My Brother George", "O Solitude! If I Must With Thee Dwell", and "Happy is England! I Could Be Content". Upon its appearance a series of personal attacks directed at Keats ensued in the pages of Blackwood's Magazine. Despite the controversy surrounding his life, Keats's literary merit prevailed. That same year Keats met Percy Bysshe Shelley who would also become a great friend. When Shelley invited the ailing Keats to stay with him and his family in Italy, he declined. When Shelley's body was washed ashore after drowning, a volume of Keats's poetry was found in his pocket.

Having worked on it for many months, Keats finished his epic poem comprising four books, Endymion: A Poetic Romance--"A thing of beauty is a joy for ever"--in 1818. That summer he travelled to the Lake District of England and on to Ireland and Scotland on a walking tour with Brown. They visited the grave of Robert Burns and reminisced upon John Milton's poetry. While he was not aware of the seriousness of it, Keats was suffering from the initial stages of the deadly infectious disease tuberculosis. He cut his trip short and upon return to Hampstead immediately tended to his brother Tom who was then in the last stages of the disease. After Tom's death in December of 1818, Keats lived with Brown.

Early one morning I was awakened in my bed by a pressure on my hand. It was Keats, who came to tell me his brother was no more. I said nothing, and we both remained silent for awhile, my hand fast locked in his. At length, my thoughts returning from the dead to the living, I said--'Have 'nothing more to do with those lodgings,--and 'alone too. Had you not better live with me?' He paused, pressed my hand warmly, and replied,-'I think it would be better.' From that moment he was my inmate. 

- Life of John Keats by Charles Armitage Brown, 1841

Around this time Keats met, fell in love with, and became engaged to eighteen year old Frances "Fanny" Brawne (1800-1865). He wrote one of his more famous sonnets to her titled "Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art". While their relationship inspired much spiritual development for Keats, it also proved to be tempestuous, filled with the highs and lows from jealousy and infatuation of first love. Brown was not impressed and tried to provide some emotional stability to Keats. Many for a time were convinced that Fanny was the cause of his illness, or, used that as an excuse to try to keep her away from him. For a while even Keats entertained the possibility that he was merely suffering physical manifestations of emotional anxieties--but after suffering a hemorrhage he gave Fanny permission to break their engagement. She would hear nothing of it and by her word provided much comfort to Keats in his last days that she was ultimately loyal to him.

Although 1819 proved to be his most prolific year of writing, Keats was also in dire financial straits. His brother George had borrowed money he could ill-afford to part with. His earning Fanny's mother's approval to marry depended on his earning as a writer and he started plans with his publisher John Taylor (1781-1864) for his next volume of poems. At the beginning of 1820 Keats started to show more pronounced signs of the deadly tuberculosis that had killed his mother and brother. After a lung hemorrhage, Keats calmly accepted his fate, and he enjoyed several weeks of respite under Brown's watchful eye. As was common belief at the time that bleeding a patient was beneficial to healing, Keats was bled and given opium to relieve his anxiety and pain. He was at times put on a starvation diet, then at other times prescribed to eat meat and drink red wine to gain strength. Despite these ill-advised good-intentions, and suffering increasing weakness and fever, Keats was able to emerge from his fugue and organise the publication of his next volume of poetry.

Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820) includes some of his best-known and oft-quoted works: "Hyperion", "To Autumn", and "Ode To A Nightingale". "Nightingale" evokes all the pain and suffering that Keats experienced during his short life-time: the death of his mother; the physical anguish he saw as a young apprentice tending to the sick and dying at St. Guy's Hospital; the death of his brother; and ultimately his own physical and spiritual suffering in love and illness. Keats lived to see positive reviews of Lamia, even in Blackwood's magazine. But the positivity was not to last long; Brown left for Scotland and the ailing Keats lived with Hunt for a time. But it was unbearable to him and only exacerbated his condition--he was unable to see Fanny, so, when he showed up at the Brawne's residence in much emotional agitation, sick, and feverish, they could not refuse him. He enjoyed a month with them, blissfully under the constant care of his beloved Fanny. Possibly bolstered by his finally having unrestricted time with her, and able to imagine a happy future with her, Keats considered his last hope of recovery of a rest cure in the warm climes of Italy. As a parting gift Fanny gave him a piece of marble which she had often clasped to cool her hand. In September of 1820 Keats sailed to Rome with friend and painter Joseph Severn (1793-1879, who was unaware of his circumstances with Fanny and the gravity of his health.

Keats put on a bold front but it soon became apparent to Severn that he was terminally ill. They stayed in rooms on the Piazza Navona near the Spanish Steps, and enjoyed the lively sights and sounds of the people and culture, but Keats soon fell into a deep depression. When his attending doctor James Clark (1788-1870) finally voiced aloud the grim prognosis, Keats's medical background came to the fore and he longed to end his life and avoid the humiliating physical and mental torments of tuberculosis. By early 1821 he was confined to bed, Severn a devoted nurse. Keats had resolved not to write to Fanny and would not read a letter from her for fear of the pain it would cause him, although he constantly clasped her marble. During bouts of coughing, fever, nightmares, Keats also tried to cheer his friend, who held him till the end.

John Keats died on 23 February 1821 in Rome, Italy, and now rests in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, by the pyramid of Caius Cestius, near his friend Shelley. His epitaph reads "Here lies one whose name was writ in water", inspired by the line "all your better deeds, Shall be in water writ" from Francis Beaumont (1584-1616) and John Fletcher's (1579-1625) five act play Philaster or: Love Lies A-bleeding. Just a year later, Shelley was buried in the same cemetery, not long after he had written "Adonais" (1821) in tribute to his friend;

I weep for Adonais--he is dead!
O, weep for Adonais! though our tears
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head!
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers,
And teach them thine own sorrow, say: "With me
Died Adonais; till the Future dares
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be
An echo and a light unto eternity!"

- Adonais by Shelley, 1821

Fanny Brawne married in 1833 and died at the age of sixty-five. English poet and friend of Brown's, Richard Monckton Milnes (1809-1885) wrote Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats (1848). During his lifetime and since, John Keats inspired numerous other authors, poets, and artists, and remains one of the most widely read and studied 19th century poets.

List of poems by John Keats

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_poems_by_John_Keats

Odes

• Ode to a Nightingale
• Ode on a Grecian Urn
• Ode to Psyche
• To Autumn
• Ode on Melancholy
• Ode on Indolence

• Ode to Fancy
• Ode - (Bards of Passion and of Mirth)
• Lines on the Mermaid Tavern
• Robin Hood - To a Friend
• Ode to Apollo

Other poems by John Keats

• I stood tiptoe upon a little hill
• Specimen of an induction to a poem
• Calidore - a fragment
• To Some Ladies
• On Receiving a Curious Shell, and a Copy of Verses from the Same Ladies
• To - Georgiana Augusta Wylie, afterwards Mrs. George Keats
• To Hope
• Imitation of Spenser
• Three Sonnets on Woman
• Sleep and Poetry
• On Death
• Women, Wine, and Snuff
• Fill For Me a Brimming Bowl
• Isabella or The Pot of Basil
• To a Young Lady who Sent Me a Laurel Crown
• On Receiving a Laurel Crown from Leigh Hunt
• To the Ladies who Saw me Crown'd
• Hymn to Apollo
• The Eve of St. Agnes

Epistles

• To George Felton Mathew
• To My Brother George
• To Charles Cowden Clarke

Sonnets

• To My Brother George
• To - [Had I a man's fair form, then might my sighs]
• Written on the Day that Mr. Leigh Hunt left Prison
• How many bards gild the lapses of time!
• To a Friend Who Sent Me Some Roses
• To G. A. W. [Georgiana Augusta Wylie]
• O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell
• To My Brothers
• Keen, fitful gusts are whisp'ring here and there
• To one who has been long in city pent
• On First Looking into Chapman's Homer
• On Leaving Some Friends at an Early Hour
• Addressed to Haydon
• On the Grasshopper and Cricket
• To Koscuisko
• Happy is England! I could be content
• Sonnet on Peace
• Sonnet to Byron
• Sonnet to Chatterton
• Sonnet to Spenser

Endymion

• Book I
• Book II
• Book III
• Book IV

Lamia

• Lamia - part 1
• Lamia - part 2

Hyperion - A Fragment

• Hyperion - Book I
• Hyperion - Book II
• Hyperion - Book III

T.S. Eliot - Biography

T.S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot's Life and Career

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/life.htm

Ronald Bush

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Eliot, T. S. (26 Sept. 1888-4 Jan. 1965), poet, critic, and editor, was born Thomas Stearns Eliot in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Henry Ware Eliot, president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, and Charlotte Champe Stearns, a former teacher, an energetic social work volunteer at the Humanity Club of St. Louis, and an amateur poet with a taste for Emerson. Eliot was the youngest of seven children, born when his parents were prosperous and secure in their mid-forties (his father had recovered from an earlier business failure) and his siblings were half grown. Afflicted with a congenital double hernia, he was in the constant eye of his mother and five older sisters. His paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had been a protégé of William Ellery Channing, the dean of American Unitarianism. William Eliot graduated from Harvard Divinity School, then moved toward the frontier. He founded the Unitarian church in St. Louis and soon became a pillar of the then southwestern city's religious and civic life. Because of William's ties to St. Louis, the Eliot family chose to remain in their urban Locust Street home long after the area had run down and their peers had moved to the suburbs. Left in the care of his Irish nurse, Annie Dunne, who sometimes took him to Catholic Mass, Eliot knew both the city's muddy streets and its exclusive drawing rooms. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis until he was sixteen. During his last year at Smith he visited the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and was so taken with the fair's native villages that he wrote short stories about primitive life for the Smith Academy Record. In 1905 he departed for a year at Milton Academy outside of Boston, preparatory to following his older brother Henry to Harvard.

Eliot's attending Harvard seems to have been a foregone conclusion. His father and mother, jealously guarding their connection to Boston's Unitarian establishment, brought the family back to the north shore every summer, and in 1896 built a substantial house at Eastern Point, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. As a boy, Eliot foraged for crabs and became an accomplished sailor, trading the Mississippi River in the warm months for the rocky shoals of Cape Ann. Later he said that he gave up a sense of belonging to either region, that he always felt like a New Englander in the Southwest, and a Southwesterner in New England (preface to Edgar Ansel Mowrer, This American World [1928]).

Despite his feelings of alienation from both of the regions he called home, Eliot impressed many classmates with his social ease when he began his studies at Harvard in the fall of 1906. Like his brother Henry before him, Eliot lived his freshman year in a fashionable private dormitory in a posh neighborhood around Mt. Auburn Street known as the "Gold Coast." He joined a number of clubs, including the literary Signet. And he began a romantic attachment to Emily Hale, a refined Bostonian who once played Mrs. Elton opposite his Mr. Woodhouse in an amateur production of Emma. Among his teachers, Eliot was drawn to the forceful moralizing of Irving Babbitt and the stylish skepticism of George Santayana, both of whom reinforced his distaste for the reform-minded, progressive university shaped by Eliot's cousin, Charles William Eliot. His attitudes, however, did not prevent him from taking advantage of the elective system that President Eliot had introduced. As a freshman, his courses were so eclectic that he soon wound up on academic probation. He recovered and persisted, attaining a B.A. in an elective program best described as comparative literature in three years, and an M.A. in English literature in the fourth.

In December 1908 a book Eliot found in the Harvard Union library changed his life: Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1895) introduced him to the poetry of Jules Laforgue, and Laforgue's combination of ironic elegance and psychological nuance gave his juvenile literary efforts a voice. By 1909-1910 his poetic vocation had been confirmed: he joined the board and was briefly secretary of Harvard's literary magazine, the Advocate, and he could recommend to his classmate William Tinckom-Fernandez the last word in French sophistication--the Vers Libre of Paul Fort and Francis Jammes. (Tinckom-Fernandez returned the favor by introducing Eliot to Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven" and John Davidson's "Thirty Bob a Week," poems Eliot took to heart, and to the verse of Ezra Pound, which Eliot had no time for.) On the Advocate, Eliot started a lifelong friendship with Conrad Aiken.

In May 1910 a suspected case of scarlet fever almost prevented Eliot's graduation. By fall, though, he was well enough to undertake a postgraduate year in Paris. He lived at 151 bis rue St. Jacques, close to the Sorbonne, and struck up a warm friendship with a fellow lodger, Jean Verdenal, a medical student who later died in the battle of the Dardenelles and to whom Eliot dedicated "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." With Verdenal, he entered the intellectual life of France then swirling, Eliot later recalled, around the figures of Émile Durkheim, Paul Janet, Rémy de Gourmont, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Bergson. Eliot attended Bergson's lectures at the College de France and was temporarily converted to Bergson's philosophical interest in the progressive evolution of consciousness. In a manner characteristic of a lifetime of conflicting attitudes, though, Eliot also gravitated toward the politically conservative (indeed monarchistic), neoclassical, and Catholic writing of Charles Maurras. Warring opposites, these enthusiasms worked together to foster a professional interest in philosophy and propelled Eliot back to a doctoral program at Harvard the next year.

In 1910 and 1911 Eliot copied into a leather notebook the poems that would establish his reputation: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "La Figlia Che Piange," "Preludes," and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." Combining some of the robustness of Robert Browning's monologues with the incantatory elegance of symbolist verse, and compacting Laforgue's poetry of alienation with the moral earnestness of what Eliot once called "Boston doubt," these poems explore the subtleties of the unconscious with a caustic wit. Their effect was both unique and compelling, and their assurance staggered his contemporaries who were privileged to read them in manuscript. Aiken, for example, marveled at "how sharp and complete and sui generis the whole thing was, from the outset. The wholeness is there, from the very beginning."

In the fall of 1911, though, Eliot was as preoccupied with ideas as with literature. A student in what has been called the golden age of Harvard philosophy, he worked amid a group that included Santayana, William James, the visiting Bertrand Russell, and Josiah Royce. Under Royce's direction, Eliot wrote a dissertation on Bergson's neoidealist critic F. H. Bradley and produced a searching philosophical critique of the psychology of consciousness. He also deepened his reading in anthropology and religion, and took almost as many courses in Sanskrit and Hindu thought as he did in philosophy. By 1914, when he left on a traveling fellowship to Europe, he had persuaded a number of Harvard's philosophers to regard him as a potential colleague.

Eliot spent the early summer of 1914 at a seminar in Marburg, Germany, with plans to study in the fall at Merton College, Oxford, with Harold Joachim, Bradley's colleague and successor. The impending war quickened his departure. In August he was in London with Aiken and by September Aiken had shown Eliot's manuscript poems to Pound, who, not easily impressed, was won over. Pound called on Eliot in late September and wrote to Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine that Eliot had "actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own." The two initiated a collaboration that would change Anglo-American poetry, but not before Eliot put down deep English roots.

In early spring 1915 Eliot's old Milton Academy and Harvard friend Scofield Thayer, later editor of the Dial and then also at Oxford, introduced Eliot to Vivien Haigh-Wood, a dancer and a friend of Thayer's sister. Eliot was drawn instantly to Vivien's exceptional frankness and charmed by her family's Hampstead polish. Abandoning his habitual tentativeness with women, in June 1915 he married Vivien on impulse at the Hampstead Registry Office. His parents were shocked, and then, when they learned of Vivien's history of emotional and physical problems, profoundly disturbed. The marriage nearly caused a family break, but it also indelibly marked the beginning of Eliot's English life. Vivien refused to cross the Atlantic in wartime, and Eliot took his place in literary London. They were to have no children.

Eliot and his wife at first turned to Bertrand Russell, who shared with them both his London flat and his considerable social resources. Russell and Vivien, however, became briefly involved, and the arrangement soured. Meanwhile Eliot tried desperately to support himself by teaching school, supplemented by a heavy load of reviewing and extension lecturing. To placate his worried parents, he labored on with his Ph.D. thesis, "Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley." (Eliot finished it in April 1916, but did not receive his degree because he was reluctant to undertake the trip to Massachusetts required for his dissertation defense.) As yet one more stimulating but taxing activity, he became assistant editor of the avant-garde magazine the Egoist. Then in spring 1917 he found steady employment; his knowledge of languages qualified him for a job in the foreign section of Lloyds Bank, where he evaluated a broad range of continental documents.

The job gave him the security he needed to turn back to poetry, and in 1917 he received an enormous boost from the publication of his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations, printed by the Egoist with the silent financial support of Ezra and Dorothy Pound.

For a struggling young American, Eliot had acquired extraordinary access to the British intellectual set. With Russell's help he was invited to country-house weekends where visitors ranged from political figures like Herbert Henry Asquith to a constellation of Bloomsbury writers, artists, and philosophers. At the same time Pound facilitated his entry into the international avant-garde, where Eliot mixed with a group including the aging Irish poet William Butler Yeats, the English painter and novelist Wyndham Lewis, and the Italian Futurist writer Tamaso Marinetti. More accomplished than Pound in the manners of the drawing room, Eliot gained a reputation in the world of belles-lettres as an observer who could shrewdly judge both accepted and experimental art from a platform of apparently enormous learning. It did not hurt that he calculated his interventions carefully, publishing only what was of first quality and creating around himself an aura of mystery. In 1920 he collected a second slim volume of verse, Poems, and a volume of criticism, The Sacred Wood. Both displayed a winning combination of erudition and jazzy bravura, and both built upon the understated discipline of a decade of philosophical seriousness. Eliot was meanwhile proofreading the Egoist's serial publication of Joyce's Ulysses, and, with Pound's urging, starting to think of himself as part of an experimental movement in modern art and literature.

Yet the years of Eliot's literary maturation were accompanied by increasing family worries. Eliot's father died in January 1919, producing a paroxysm of guilt in the son who had hoped he would have time to heal the bad feelings caused by his marriage and emigration. At the same time Vivien's emotional and physical health deteriorated, and the financial and emotional strain of her condition took its toll. After an extended visit in the summer of 1921 from his mother and sister Marion, Eliot suffered a nervous collapse and, on his physician's advice, took a three month's rest cure, first on the coast at Margate and then at a sanitarium Russell's friend Lady Ottoline Morell recommended at Lausanne, Switzerland.

Whether because of the breakdown or the long needed rest it imposed, Eliot broke through a severe writer's block and completed a long poem he had been working on since 1919. Assembled out of dramatic vignettes based on Eliot's London life, The Waste Land's extraordinary intensity stems from a sudden fusing of diverse materials into a rhythmic whole of great skill and daring. Though it would be forced into the mold of an academic set piece on the order of Milton’s "Lycidas," The Waste Land was at first correctly perceived as a work of jazzlike syncopation--and, like 1920s jazz, essentially iconoclastic. A poem suffused with Eliot's horror of life, it was taken over by the postwar generation as a rallying cry for its sense of disillusionment. Pound, who helped pare and sharpen the poem when Eliot stopped in Paris on his way to and from Lausanne, praised it with a godparent's fervor. As important, Eliot's old friend Thayer, by then publisher of the Dial, decided even before he had seen the finished poem to make it the centerpiece of the magazine's attempt to establish American letters in the vanguard of modern culture. To secure The Waste Land for the Dial, Thayer arranged in 1922 to award Eliot the magazine's annual prize of two thousand dollars and to trumpet The Waste Land's importance with an essay commissioned from the Dial's already influential Edmund Wilson. It did not hurt that 1922 also saw the long-heralded publication of Ulysses, or that in 1923 Eliot linked himself and Joyce with Einstein in the public mind in an essay entitled "Ulysses, Order and Myth." Meteorically, Eliot, Joyce, and, to a lesser extent, Pound were joined in a single glow--each nearly as notorious as Picasso.

The masterstroke of Eliot's career was to parlay the success of The Waste Land by means of an equally ambitious effort of a more traditional literary kind. With Jacques Riviere's La Nouvelle Revue Française in mind, in 1922 Eliot jumped at an offer from Lady Rothermere, wife of the publisher of the Daily Mail, to edit a high-profile literary journal. The first number of the Criterion appeared in October 1922. Like The Waste Land, it took the whole of European culture in its sights. The Criterion's editorial voice placed Eliot at the center of London writing.

Eliot, however, was too consumed by domestic anxiety to appreciate his success. In 1923 Vivien nearly died, and Eliot, in despair, came close to a second breakdown. The next two years were almost as bad, until a lucky chance allowed him to escape from the demands of his job at the bank. Geoffrey Faber, of the new publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), saw the advantages of Eliot's dual expertise in business and letters and recruited him as literary editor. At about the same time, Eliot reached out for religious support. Having long found his family's Unitarianism unsatisfying, he turned to the Anglican church. The seeds of his future faith can be found in The Hollow Men, though the poem was read as a sequel to The Waste Land's philosophical despair when it appeared in Poems 1909-1925 (1925). In June 1927 few followers were prepared for Eliot's baptism into the Church of England. And so, within five years of his avant-garde success, Eliot provoked a second storm. The furor grew in November 1927 when Eliot took British citizenship, and again in 1928 when he collected a group of politically conservative essays under the title of For Lancelot Andrewes, prefacing them with a declaration that he considered himself a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion." Eliot's poetry now addressed explicitly religious situations. In the late 1920s he published a series of shorter poems in Faber's Ariel series--short pieces issued in pamphlet form within striking modern covers. These included "Journey of the Magi" (1927), "A Song for Simeon" (1928), "Animula" (1929), "Marina" (1930), and 'Triumphal March" (1931). Steeped in Eliot's contemporary study of Dante and the late Shakespeare, all of them meditate on spiritual growth and anticipate the longer and more celebrated Ash-Wednesday (1930). "Journey of the Magi" and "A Song for Simeon" are also exercises in Browningesque dramatic monologues, and speak to Eliot's desire, pronounced since 1922, to exchange the symbolist fluidity of the psychological lyric for a more traditional dramatic form.

Eliot spent much of the last half of his career writing one kind of drama or another, and attempting to reach (and bring together) a larger and more varied audience. As early as 1923 he had written parts of an experimental and striking jazz play, Sweeney Agonistes (never finished, it was published in fragments in 1932 and performed by actors in masks by London's Group Theatre in 1934). In early 1934 he composed a church pageant with accompanying choruses entitled The Rock, performed in May and June 1934 at Sadler's Wells. Almost immediately following these performances, Bishop Bell commissioned a church drama having to do with Canterbury Cathedral, which, as Murder in the Cathedral, was performed in the Chapter House at Canterbury in June 1935 and was moved to the Mercury Theatre at Notting Hill Gate in November and eventually to the Old Vic. In the late 1930s, Eliot attempted to conflate a drama of spiritual crisis with a Noël Coward-inspired contemporary theater of social manners. Though Eliot based The Family Reunion on the plot of Aeschylus's Eumenides, he designed it to tell a story of Christian redemption. The play opened in the West End in March 1939 and closed to mixed reviews five weeks later. Eliot was disheartened, but after the war fashioned more popular (though less powerful) combinations of the same elements to much greater success. The Cocktail Party, modernizing Euripides's Alcestis with some of the insouciance of Noël Coward, with a cast that included Alec Guinness, opened to a warm critical reception at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1949 and enjoyed popular success starting on Broadway in January 1950. Eliot's last two plays were more labored and fared less well. The Confidential Clerk had a respectable run at the Lyric Theatre in London in September 1953, and The Elder Statesman premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in August 1958 and closed after a lukewarm run in London in the fall.

Eliot's reputation as a poet and man of letters, increasing incrementally from the mid-1920s, advanced and far outstripped his theatrical success. As early as 1926 he delivered the prestigious Clark Lectures at Cambridge University, followed in 1932-1933 by the Norton Lectures at Harvard, and just about every other honor the academy or the literary world had to offer. In 1948 Eliot received the Nobel Prize for literature during a fellowship stay at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. By 1950 his authority had reached a level that seemed comparable in English writing to that of figures like Samuel Johnson or Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Ironically, after 1925 Eliot's marriage steadily deteriorated, turning his public success hollow. During the tenure of his Norton year at Harvard he separated from Vivien, but would not consider divorce because of his Anglican beliefs. For most of the 1930s he secluded himself from Vivien's often histrionic attempts to embarrass him into a reconciliation, and made an anguished attempt to order his life around his editorial duties at Faber's and the Criterion and around work at his Kensington church. He also reestablished communication with Emily Hale, especially after 1934, when she began summering with relatives in the Cotswolds. Out of his thinking of "what might have been," associated with their visit to an abandoned great house, Eliot composed "Burnt Norton," published as the last poem in his Collected Poems 1909-1935 (1936). With its combination of symbolist indirection and meditative gravity, "Burnt Norton" gave Eliot the model for another decade of major verse.

In 1938 Vivien was committed to Northumberland House, a mental hospital north of London. In 1939, with the war impending, the Criterion, which had occupied itself with the deepening political crisis of Europe, ceased publication. During the Blitz, Eliot served as an air-raid warden, but spent long weekends as a guest with friends near Guildford in the country. In these circumstances, he wrote three more poems, each more somber than the last, patterned on the voice and five-part structure of "Burnt Norton." "East Coker" was published at Easter 1940 and took its title from the village that Eliot's ancestor Andrew Eliot had departed from for America in the seventeenth century. (Eliot had visited East Coker in 1937.) "The Dry Salvages," published in 1941, reverted to Eliot's experience as a boy on the Mississippi and sailing on the Massachussetts coast. Its title refers to a set of dangerously hidden rocks near Cape Ann. "Little Gidding" was published in 1942 and had a less private subject, suitable to its larger ambitions. Little Gidding, near Cambridge, had been the site of an Anglican religious community that maintained a perilous existence for the first part of the English civil war. Paired with Eliot's experience walking the blazing streets of London during World War II, the community of Little Gidding inspired an extended meditation on the subject of the individual's duties in a world of human suffering. Its centerpiece was a sustained homage to Dante written in a form of terza rima, dramatizing Eliot's meeting with a "familiar compound ghost" he associates with Yeats and Swift.

Four Quartets (1943), as the suite of four poems was entitled, for a period displaced The Waste Land as Eliot's most celebrated work. The British public especially responded to the topical references in the wartime poems and to the tone of Eliot's public meditation on a common disaster. Eliot's longtime readers, however, were more reticent. Some, notably F. R. Leavis, praised the philosophical suppleness of Eliot syntax, but distrusted Eliot's swerve from the authenticity of a rigorously individual voice. And, as Eliot's conservative religious and political convictions began to seem less congenial in the postwar world, other readers reacted with suspicion to his assertions of authority, obvious in Four Quartets and implicit in the earlier poetry. The result, fueled by intermittent rediscovery of Eliot's occasional anti-Semitic rhetoric, has been a progressive downward revision of his once towering reputation.

After the war, Eliot wrote no more major poetry, turning entirely to his plays and to literary essays, the most important of which revisited the French symbolists and the development of language in twentieth-century poetry. After Vivien died in January 1947, Eliot led a protected life as a flatmate of the critic John Hayward. In January 1957 he married Valerie Fletcher and attained a degree of contentedness that had eluded him all his life. He died in London and, according to his own instructions, his ashes were interred in the church of St. Michael's in East Coker. A commemorative plaque on the church wall bears his chosen epitaph--lines chosen from Four Quartets: "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning."

In the decades after his death Eliot's reputation slipped further. Sometimes regarded as too academic (William Carlos Williams's view), Eliot was also frequently criticized (as he himself--perhaps just as unfairly--had criticized Milton) for a deadening neoclassicism. However, the multivarious tributes from practicing poets of many schools published during his centenary in 1988 was a strong indication of the intimidating continued presence of his poetic voice. In a period less engaged with politics and ideology than the 1980s and early 1990s, the lasting strengths of his poetic technique will likely reassert themselves. Already the strong affinities of Eliot's postsymbolist style with currently more influential poets like Wallace Stevens (Eliot's contemporary at Harvard and a fellow student of Santayana) have been reassessed, as has the tough philosophical skepticism of his prose. A master of poetic syntax, a poet who shuddered to repeat himself, a dramatist of the terrors of the inner life (and of the evasions of conscience), Eliot remains one of the twentieth century's major poets.

The most important collections of Eliot's manuscripts can be found at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the New York Public Library; and the libraries of King's and Magdalene colleges, Cambridge University. Aside from the volumes already noted, among Eliot's numerous publications should be mentioned his extended appreciation, Dante (1929); his free rendition of Anabasis: A Poem by St. -J. Perse (1930); the collection of his Selected Essays 1917-1932 (1932; rev. ed., 1950); his Norton lectures, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933); his pugnacious and never reprinted Page-Barbour lectures, After Strange Gods (1934); Essays Ancient and Modern (1936); his metrical jeux d'esprit, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), popularized in the musical Cats; his studies in Christian culture, The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes towards the Definition of Culture, (1948); and the late collections of essays On Poetry and Poets (1957) and To Criticize the Critic (1965). Eliot's Poems Written in Early Youth were collected and printed in 1950, his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation was published in 1964 as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, and the first volume of his Letters appeared in 1988.

Although no authorized biography of Eliot has yet appeared, Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (1984), and Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's New Life (1988), are extremely useful, supplemented by smaller specialized studies such as John Soldo, The Tempering of T. S. Eliot (1983), and by studies in biographical criticism such as Lyndall Gordon, Eliot's Early Years (1977), and Ronald Bush, T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style (1984). The indispensable bibliography of Eliot's work is Donald Gallup, T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (1947; rev. ed., 1969). Standard critical studies begin with an early group including F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (1935; rev. ed., 1947); Helen Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot (1949); Grover Smith, T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays (1950); and Hugh Kenner, T. S. Eliot: The Invisible Poet (1959). F. R. Leavis's early and important appreciation in New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) was expanded and qualified in essays collected in The Living Principle (1975). Essential studies of the composition of The Waste Land and Four Quartets can be found in A. Walton Litz, ed., Eliot in His Time (1973), and in Helen Gardner, The Composition of "Four Quartets" (1978).

From American National Biography. Ed. John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies.

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