Thursday, September 22, 2005

Who is T.S. Eliot?

I've searched for short but rigorous biographies of Eliot on the web.
The most extensive one is here, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Sample passage:
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.
For a much shorter bio, check out Who2.com via this link. Who2 calls Eliot's The Waste Land "the most famous English poem of the 20th century."

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