Autobiographical

Elements in ‘The
Waste Land’
T.S. Eliot
26 September 1888 –
4 January 1965
 Sources:
• Bloom, Harold. The Story Behind the Story. Bloom’s Guides T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. 2007.
Bloom’s Literary Criticism. New York
• Eliot, T.S. Tradition and Individual Talent. The Egoist. 1919.
• Elisa, Dreamwidth.Literary Heritage: T.S. Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965). My
reviews and Ramblings. LGBT reviews and ramblings since 2006. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
<http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/3418380.html>
• Laity, Cassandra, Nancy K. Gish. Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot .Cambridge
University Press; 1ST edition. 2004
• Miller Jr, James E. T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977).
Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Nobelprize.org. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 28 Oct 2014.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1948/press.html
• Parkar, Rikard A. T.S. Eliot and Jean Verdenal. Exploring The Waste Land. Originally published:
January 1999. Last updated: Sunday, September 29, 2002. Accessed on 28 Oct. 2014. 
http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/exjean.html
• Wikipedia contributors. "T. S. Eliot." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia, 23 Oct. 2014. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
• Woods, Gregory. An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture.
Ed. Claude J. Summers. New England Publishing Associates: 2002 >
www.glbtq.com/literature/eliot_ts.html <
 T.S. Eliot’s poetic creed: High priest of
Depersonalization
• Isn’t it ridiculous to say that T.S. Eliot, who is
high priest of depersonalization and who quite
overtly declared that poet adopts the process of
depersonalization, which is “a continual
surrender of himself as he is at the moment to
something which is more valuable. . . The
progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality.”, is very much
present in the poem
• (Tradition and Individual Talent)
 T.S. Eliot’s poetic creed: High priest of
Depersonalization
• The poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a
particular medium, which is only a medium and
not a personality, in which impressions and
experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected
ways. Impressions and experiences which are
important for the man may take no place in the
poetry, and those which become important in the
poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man,
the personality.”
• (Tradition and Individual Talent)
 Finding Eliot in ‘The Waste Land’
• Thus, it is not easy to find an autobiographical
elements in the works of poets like T.S. Eliot.
• What is know about him - In 1928, to the
consternation of the literati, Eliot pronounced himself
a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and
Anglo-Catholic in religion."
• Can we read more of poet in his poetry?
• Let us make an attempt to explore his life and the
poem with reference to the articles, books mentioned
in the slide ‘Sources’.
 Some facts about Eliot’s life
• Eliot was born into the Eliot family, a Boston Brahmin family with roots
in England and New England. T.S. Eliot's grandfather William Greenleaf
Eliot had moved to St. Louis, Missouri in order to establish a Unitarian
Church there. His father Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919) was a successful
businessman. Eliot grew up in two contrasting geographies and cultures.
• The neighborhood in St. Louis in which the Eliots lived was in decline, but
because of their ties to the city, they did not move to the suburbs as
others of their class did. Thus, Eliot was familiar with the rundown streets
of the city and the well to-do drawing rooms of his parents’ social circle.
• Similarly, although he was raised Unitarian, his nurse, Annie Dunne, an
Irish Catholic, sometimes took him to Mass. These conflicting influences
are apparent in Eliot’s poetry, especially in The Waste Land, where high
and low dialects, popular and classical culture, and upper and lower class
characters are juxtaposed.
• (Wikipedia)
 Some facts about Eliot’s life
• Among his teachers were the philosopher George
Santayana and Irving Babbitt, an influential literary
scholar and culture critic whose conservative moral
thought generated a movement called the New
Humanism.
• With Santayana he studied allegory and read Dante in
Italian; Babbit introduced him to Eastern religion,
Sanskrit, and French literary criticism.
• Both teachers influenced Eliot’s own austere political and
moral conservatism.
• (Wikipedia)
 Some facts about Eliot’s life
• In 1909, in the Harvard library, Eliot came across Arthur
Symons’ book, The Symbolist Movement in Literature.
• At Harvard, too, Eliot met the English philosopher and
mathematician, Bertrand Russell.
• In 1910, Eliot joined the staff of the literary magazine,
The Harvard Advocate.
• Within the circle of its contributors, he broadened his
knowledge of contemporary poets and poetry,
including the poetry of Ezra Pound, who would shape
The Waste Land.
 Some facts about Eliot’s life
• He also attended the lectures of the philosopher
Henri Bergson at the College de France.
• In 1915, Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. It
was a disastrous marriage that began badly.
• Soon, however, frustrated by a lack of affection
from her husband, Vivienne allowed herself to
begin a relationship with Russell, of which Eliot
was jealous but also tolerant.
 Some facts about Eliot’s life
• Several factors are responsible for Eliot's infatuation
with literature during his childhood.
• First, Eliot had to overcome physical limitations as a
child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal
hernia, Eliot could not participate in many physical
activities and thus was prevented from interacting
socially with his peers.
• As Eliot was often isolated, his love of literature
developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy
immediately became obsessed with books. 
 Some facts about Eliot’s life
• Secondly, Eliot also credited his hometown with
fuelling his literary vision:
– "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply
than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there
is something in having passed one's childhood beside
the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who
have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born
here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London.“
• Thus, from the onset, literature was an essential part
of Eliot's childhood and both his disability and
location influenced him.
 Letters reveal the person
• In a private paper written in his sixties, Eliot
confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was in
love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn
my boats and commit myself to staying in England.
And she persuaded herself (also under the influence
of [Ezra] Pound) that she would save the poet by
keeping him in England. To her, the marriage
brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of
mind out of which came The Waste Land. (Eliot, T. S. The Letters
of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898–1922, p. xvii)

• Virginia Woolf once said: "He was one of those poets

 

who live by scratching, and his wife was his itch."

 The Lost Manuscript of ‘The Waste Land’

• John Gordan, the curator of the library’s Berg

Collection, out of respect for Eliot, who was still alive,
did not make the acquisition or the existence of the
manuscript public until Eliot died in 1965. Then
Gordan sent a microfilm of the manuscript to Valerie
Fletcher Eliot, Eliot’s widow and his secretary, and she
put together an edition of the original drafts. It was
published as The Waste Land: Facsimile and
Manuscripts of the Original Drafts in 1971.
• Bloom, Harold. The Story Behind the Story. Bloom’s Guides T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
2007. Bloom’s Literary Criticism. New York
 The Lost Manuscript
• Just as the complete manuscript drafts of The
Waste Land made clearer the meaning and
the method of the poem, so, too, have the
biographical details of Eliot’s married and
emotional life in the late teens and early
1920s helped to clarify certain aspects of the
poem. (Bloom)
 A trivial tease or a serious comment?

• Even though Eliot was known to have said that

the poem represented his own grumblings
rather than a serious social critique, his
primary aesthetic principle of literature, that
the poet should remove himself from his
work, made his observation seem like a tease
rather than a serious comment. (Bloom)
 Biographical Criticism
• Biographical scholarship emerging at the end
of the twentieth century, however, has
focused on the unhappiness of his first
marriage, particularly on his own sexual
impotence and his wife’s nervous agitation
and sexual promiscuity.
• Bloom, Harold. The Story Behind the Story. Bloom’s Guides T.S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land. 2007. Bloom’s Literary Criticism. New York
 Is the woman, Lil in the poem, Vivienne
Haigh-Wood - his wife?
• These factors illuminate, even while not
entirely accounting for, the personalities of the
narrator and of the woman in the first part of
“A Game of Chess”—his diffidence and her
high-strung sensuality.
(Bloom, Harold. The Story Behind the Story.
Bloom’s Guides T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
2007. Bloom’s Literary Criticism. New York)
 Is the Phlebas, Jean Verdenal, his friend?
• Similarly, the intensity of Eliot’s friendship with Jean
Verdenal, who was killed in 1915 in the war, in Paris in
1911 may have affected the composition of “Death by
Water” and the elegiac (mournful) tone of the poem as a
whole.
• In 1952, John Peter, later a novelist but then a Canadian
academic, published an essay, "A New Interpretation
of The Waste Land" in the journal Essays in Criticism in
which he interpreted Eliot's poem The Waste Land as an
elegy for a dead (male) friend. (Wiki)
• Bloom, Harold. The Story Behind the Story. Bloom’s Guides T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. 2007. Bloom’s Literary
Criticism. New York
• In January 1972, as part of a series of letters to
the London Times Literary Supplement about
Eliot's drafts, G. Wilson Knight made the
observation that the so-called "hyacinth girl"
was male. 
• Knight expanded upon his observation in an
essay "Thoughts on The Waste Land"  (The Denver Quarterly 7 (2):

later that year.

1–13)
 Attempts to depersonalize his personal
emotions and feelings
• Eliot used the circumstances and the emotions of his own life to
invent and give vitality to images which were partially drawn
from his own experiences and yet reflected a world broader than
his own private one. (Bloom)
• But the facts are unearthed by Biographical critics like
– Laity, Cassandra, Nancy K. Gish. Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S.
Eliot
– Miller Jr, James E. T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the
Demons
– Parkar, Rikard A. T.S. Eliot and Jean Verdenal. Exploring The Waste Land.
– Woods, Gregory. An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender,
and Queer Culture
Noble Prize: Reinventing the True Identity of
T.S. Eliot as a Poet
• The autobiographical study of Eliot’s The Waste
Land not only deconstructs his theory of
depersonalization but also reveals his true self. It
unmasks the man behind.
• But the discussion would be incomplete if we do
not consider the remarks made during the Noble
Prize award ceremony in 1948.
• (note: the following speech refers to Eliot’s lifetime
contribution to literature and is not solely based on ‘The
Waste Land’)
 Prior to the speech, Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish
Academy made these remarks:

• “Humility is also the characteristic which you,

Mr. Eliot, have come to regard as man's
virtue. ‹The only wisdom we can hope to
acquire is the wisdom of humility.› At first it
did not appear that this would be the final
result of your visions and your acuity of
thought.
• (Nobelprize.org)
 Prior to the speech, Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish
Academy made these remarks:

• (The) contact was a shock to you, the

expression of which you brought to
perfection in The Waste Land, in which the
confusion and vulgarity of the civilization
became the object of your scathing criticism.
 Prior to the speech, Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish
Academy made these remarks:

• But beneath that criticism there lay profound

and painful disillusionment, and out of this
disillusionment there grew forth a feeling of
sympathy, and out of that sympathy was
born a growing urge to rescue from the ruins
of the confusion the fragments from which
order and stability might be restored.
• (Nobelprize.org)
 T.S. Eliot vs Sigmund Freud
• For Freud the most profound cause of the confusion lay in
the Unbehagen (discomfort, uneasiness) in der Kultur of
modern man. In his opinion, there must be sought a
collective and individual balance, which should constantly
take into account man's primitive instincts.
• You, Mr. Eliot, are of the opposite opinion. For you the
salvation of man lies in the preservation of the cultural
tradition, which, in our more mature years, lives with
greater vigour within us than does primitiveness, and
which we must preserve if chaos is to be avoided.
• (Nobelprize.org)
 Tradition and T.S. Eliot (the Individual)

• Tradition is not a dead load which we drag

along with us, and which in our youthful
desire for freedom we seek to throw off.
• It is the soil in which the seeds of coming
harvests are to be sown, and from which
future harvests will be garnered.
• (Nobelprize.org)
 Conclusion
• It is well said that “Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is
directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry” . . . and . . . “Poetry
is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is
not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”.
• Consciously, the poet should make such attempts . . . But the
Un/Subconscious is not under the control and commands of
Conscious Mind.
• It finds it outlet in the expression. At the very moment when, quite
consciously, the poet has surrendered itself to the process of
creation, it leaks out – it finds its moment of expression.
• T.S. Eliot, the high priest of the school of depersonalization is also
not free from the ‘Un/Subconscious overflow of powerful self . . .
Which can only be recollected in tranquility by the biographical
critics’.
 Acknowledgement for Photographs /Images

• http://lilolia.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/nobel-prize.jpg
• http://standpointmag.co.uk/files/u28/Eliot-and-wife.jpg
• http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/2522/full
• http://cdn.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/ts-eliot.jp
g
• http://www.bookforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id08596/article00.jpg
• http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/medal.html
 Thank you!
Dilip Barad
Dept. of English,
M.K. Bhavnagar University
Bhavnagar (Gujarat – India)
www.dilipbarad.com
www.dilipbarad.blogspot.in
dilipbarad@gmail.com