T. S. Eliot

Life

Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, the youngest of seven children. His family was Unitarian, a denomination that rejects the doctrine of the Trinity.

After moving to England, he was working at Lloyds Bank by around 1917. In 1925 he joined the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), where he worked for the rest of his life, eventually becoming a director. The Waste Land, published in 1922, established his reputation as a poet.

In the mid-1920s Eliot came to believe that Unitarianism could not adequately address such fundamental questions as birth, death, hell, and heaven, and he drew closer to the Church of England. William Force Stead, a fellow American and chaplain of Worcester College, Oxford, encouraged him to read the poetry of George Herbert and John Donne and the sermons of Bishop Lancelot Andrewes. On June 29, 1927, Stead privately baptized Eliot in the church at Finstock, Oxfordshire. The following day Eliot was confirmed by the Bishop of Oxford; confirmation is the rite corresponding to Protestant admission to communicant membership. In November of the same year he became a British subject. He died on January 4, 1965.

Church Service and Works

Eliot served the church not as a clergyman but as a layman. He was a member of St Stephen's Church, Gloucester Road, London, for more than forty years and served as churchwarden for twenty-five of them. A churchwarden is a lay officer who assists with the finances and administration of a parish. The church belongs to the Anglo-Catholic tradition, a movement within Anglicanism that emphasizes the liturgy and sacraments of the Catholic tradition. In the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes, Eliot described himself as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion."

"Journey of the Magi" (1927), written shortly after his baptism, opens with a passage from a sermon Andrewes preached on Epiphany in 1622 and takes as its subject the story of the Magi. "Ash Wednesday," published in 1930, is regarded as the work in which he publicly declared his faith. His later works include Four Quartets. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Some scholars compare the five sections of The Waste Land, written before his conversion, with the themes of the five Sundays of Lent, reading the poem as a record of his spiritual search.

Assessment

Anglican sources regard him as one of the most important English-language poets of the twentieth century and as a leading figure in expressing Anglican spirituality through poetry and drama. Some studies view his conversion as the culmination of his intellectual, cultural, artistic, and spiritual development. The literary world, however, reacted coolly to his conversion at the time; the novelist Virginia Woolf reportedly found it scarcely believable.