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Believing this style
best represented the fragmentation of the modern world, Eliot focused on the
sterility of modern culture and its lack of tradition and ritual. Despite
this pessimistic viewpoint, many find its mythical, religious ending hopeful
about humanity's chance for renewal. Eliot was chiefly known for his genius
in poetry. Yet, we can also sense his drama as a continuation of his poems
in nature. In his opinion, poem is a most useful means to cut off every
aspect of feeling and taste of audience and reader, while at the same time,
the most ideal media for poetry and most direct expressive style to show
this social function is drama.
The six-part poem Ash Wednesday (1930) and other
religious works in the early part of the 1930s, while stellar in their own
right, retrospectively feel like a warm-up for his epic Four Quartets
(completed and published together in 1943). In the first quartet, visiting
tenement in countryside in England, interwoven with his own failure in
marriage, Eliot feels a temptation of a return to history, re-option, cancel
the past and recreate the present. All those awakened vision toward time and
eternity, history and reality, life and art, as well as the God. The second
quartet mentions the bondage given by time and mystery of circulation. The
third quartet talks about bottomless oceans, powerful reefs, and great
Mississippi that imply an image of journey. The last quartet tells a story
that some pious Christians lead a life of work and pray by giving up
everything in countryside in about the 10th century. It also discusses death
and rebirth as well as problems an artist will face. Eliot used his wit,
philosophical preoccupation with time, and vocal range to examine further
religious issues.
Eliot continued his Renaissance man ways by writing his first
play, "Murder in the Cathedral," in 1935. A verse drama about the
murder of Archbishop Thomas à Becket, the play's religious themes
were forerunners of Eliot's four other major plays, "The Family Reunion"
(1939), "The Cocktail Party" (1949), "The Confidential Clerk"
(1953), and "The Elder Statesman" (1959). Eliot believes that poetry
is a most natural style of art and drama is a best way to concretize it.
Metaphysical imagination impressed him well and he advocated to saving the
decline in the western world through religious enlightening education.
Religious verse dramas cloaked in secular conversational comedy, Eliot
believed whatever pretensions his detractors may have found in his
Anglophilia. He leapt ahead with this anti-pretension with "Old Possum's
Book of Practical Cats" (1939), a book of verse, for children, that was
eventually adapted into the Broadway musical "Cats."
As one might expect from his work, Eliot was unhappy for most
of his life, but his second marriage in 1957 proved fruitful. When he died
in 1965, he was the recipient of a Nobel Prize (1948), author of the
century's most influential poem, and arguably the century's most important
poet. Perhaps due to the large shadow he casts, relatively few poets have
tried to ape his style; others simply find him cold. Still, no one can
escape the authority of Eliot's Modernism, one as relevant today as it was
in 1922. While Eliot may not have as much influence on poets today as some
of his contemporaries, he has had a far greater impact on poetry.
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