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Eliot Thomas 1888 - 1965 (77)

To do the useful thing, to say the courageous thing, to contemplate the beautiful thing: that is enough for one man's life.


QUOTES

The Hollow Men

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Thomas Sterns Eliot (1888-1965) was a distinguished American poet, one of the founders of the modernist movement in poetry, and at the same time a playwright and literary critic. Born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, USA, his father was a successful businessman and his mother a teacher who also wrote poetry. He was the last child after 4 sisters and 1 brother, all 8 to 19 years older than him. He was born with a congenital double hernia and was forced to wear a special bandage, he was generally a vulnerable child. During his studies of English literature at Harvard, he began writing poems and publishing them in the university literary magazine. In 1910 he traveled to Europe, staying mainly in Paris where he studied French literature; in 1911 he returned and enrolled as a doctoral student in the department of philosophy at Harvard.

In 1914 he returned to Europe, to continue his studies at Oxford, two decisive events happened in his life. He first met the poet Ezra Pound who encouraged him and made his poetry known in London literary circles, and secondly he married, secretly from his parents, Vivienne Hay-Wood (1888-1947), which resulted in living all his life in England, estranged from his paternal family. After graduating, he worked for a while as a teacher and later as a bank clerk, at the same time he was writing essays, poems, reviews, plays. His marriage did not go well as it seems that Vivienne had psychological problems. In 1921, he collapsed due to physical and mental overwork,as he was working many ours in the bank and all his free time he was writing; he entered a sanatorium where he wrote his best known work, "Waste land.

His living conditions improved in 1925 when he left the bank and got a job in a publishing house, however, the problems with his wife did not stop; they separated and she was locked up in a psychiatric hospital where she died in 1947. Eliot was more and more successful and recognized during these years and in 1948 he was awarded the Nobel literature. In 1957 he married his secretary, who offered him the family peace he had always sought, but didn't last, as his health problems soon began. In 1964, he made one last trip to his homeland, in October of the same year, and while he was at his house in London, his left side suddenly became paralyzed and he fell into a coma; he died in January 1965 of emphysema. On his grave, after his wish, the phrase from his poem ‘Four Quartets’ was written: “In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning ".