Biography
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis till he was eighteen and went to Harvard University. He earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and gave several poems to the Harvard Advocate. He lived in Paris for a year and came back to Harvard to practice a doctorate in philosophy, but he returned to English. He married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and started to work in London as a teacher first then for Lloyds Bank. In London, he came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his skills for poems at once and helped out in the publication of his work in a number of magazines. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. With the publication of The Waste Land, Eliots standing began to grow to nearly mythic size. For the next thirty years, he was the most governing form in poetry and literary analysis in the English-speaking world.
His poems cleared the disappointment of a younger post-World-War-I generation with the values and rules. He had an enormous force on modern literary taste were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His major poems are; Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets, The Sacred Wood, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, After Strange Gods, Notes Towards, the Definition of Culture, Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.
He published many younger poets and became director of the firm. He got divorced with his first wife and married to Valerie Fletcher. He received the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1948 and died in London in 1965.
His Poem
Sweeney among the Nightingales
APENECK SWEENEY spreads his knees
Letting his arms hang down to laugh,
The zebra stripes along his jaw
Swelling to maculate giraffe.
The circles of the stormy moon
Slide westward toward the River Plate,
Death and the Raven drift above
And Sweeney guards the hornd gate.
Gloomy Orion and the Dog
Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;
The person in the Spanish cape
Tries to sit on Sweeneys knees
Slips and pulls the table cloth
Overturns a coffee-cup,
Reorganised upon the floor
She yawns and draws a stocking up;
The silent man in mocha brown
Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes;
The waiter brings in oranges
Bananas figs and hothouse grapes;
The silent vertebrate in brown
Contracts and concentrates, withdraws;
Rachel ne Rabinovitch
Tears at the grapes with murderous paws;
She and the lady in the cape
Are suspect, thought to be in league;
Therefore the man with heavy eyes
Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,
 Leaves the room and reappears
Outside the window, leaning in,
Branches of wistaria
Circumscribe a golden grin;
The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,
And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.
Analysis
I chose T. S. Eliot because his poems seem much more interesting than other poets’ poems. I don’t really get his poems even though i read them over and over again but they seem very interesting, special and unique. i think he has pretty ordinary life than other poets because poets usually have weird or unnormal life. The poem i chose is called “Sweeney among the Nightingales”. This poem has 10 stanzas with 4 lines for each stanza. And there are some examples of personification. And there isnt really a pattern of rhyming but some of the sentences rhyme. like this stanza,
“The host with someone indistinct
Converses at the door apart,
The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,”
all of them rhyme except for the third line. Actaully, there is a pattern like for every stanza, first sentence and third sentence rhyme. This sentence is an example of personification ”Bananas figs and hothouse grapes; ” This sentence is another example of personificatoin of this poem “Gloomy Orion and the Dog, Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas;” This is also another example of personification “The circles of the stormy moon, Slide westward toward the River Plate,” I cant find any examples of metaphor because there is no line with Like or As.
Picture of T. S. Eliot
To learn more about the figurative language, CLICK HERE
