The Highly Personal Poetry of T. S. Eliot

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

In my day job as a teacher in a university, I teach a final-year undergraduate module which bears the subtitle ‘The Modern Poet from T. S. Eliot to Sylvia Plath’. These two figures, and their very distinct bodies of work, effectively ‘bookend’ a module which runs from the birth of modern poetry in the immediate pre-WWI years right through to the Cold War and the swinging sixties.

Eliot and Plath are, after all, two colossi of twentieth-century poetry. One of them was born in the US and was educated in Massachusetts, in New England, before travelling to England on an Oxbridge scholarship. However, they were drawn to the bright lights of London and harboured ambitions of becoming a great poet, and it is in London that they settled, dying there in the 1960s.

This poet had only been in England a few months when they fell in love with a Brit who also had aspirations to become a poet and who would be an important source of inspiration for their work. The pair very quickly married, even though it would soon become apparent that their marriage was fraught with difficulties and marital tensions and they would later separate.

This poet’s work, which includes a collection known as ‘the Ariel poems’, is often highly personal and autobiographical, dealing with, among other things, their unstable mental health, their father’s death, and their marital problems. At the same time, they believed that the raw materials of their personal experience should be transformed and transmuted into something more universal and impersonal, and they were fond of writing using mythical figures, invented personas, and different voices, with some of their most famous poems being examples of dramatic monologues.

I am, of course, talking about … T. S. Eliot.

But you’d be forgiven for thinking I was talking about Sylvia Plath, for the above description actually fits equally well with her life and work, too. But whilst Plath’s posthumous Ariel collection is well-known, Eliot’s series of ‘Ariel poems’ – initially written for a series of Faber Christmas cards – are among his minor works.

Nevertheless, they were both born in the US, came to England initially on a scholarship (Eliot to Oxford, Plath to Cambridge), married someone (Vivienne Haigh-Wood; Ted Hughes) within months of meeting them, and died in London in the 1960s (Plath in 1963; Eliot two years later).

But the chief difference between the two, at least in terms of how their poetry is viewed by many readers and critics, is in how ‘personal’ their work is. Whereas Eliot’s work is usually regarded as highly impersonal – an interpretation he himself encouraged when he argued, in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), that ‘poetry is … not an expression of personality, but an escape from personality’ – Plath’s is read as deeply embedded in, and inspired by, her personal life.

But is this really an accurate assessment of their work? Let’s take Plath first. True, some of her most famous poems clearly reflect aspects of her personal life: ‘Daddy’, for instance, is seen as a response to the death of her father when Plath was just eight years old, with her husband Ted Hughes being a shadowy presence in the husband who vampirically fed on the female speaker’s blood for seven years. But as Plath’s prefatory remark on the poem when she read it on the radio made clear, the poem is spoken by ‘a girl with an Electra complex’. This girl both is and is not Sylvia Plath herself.

And many of Plath’s other poems – and even ‘Daddy’ approaches this – read more like dramatic monologues. ‘Elm’ effectively has two speakers: the titular tree and a female speaker who is haunted by it. Are both of these figures meant to be Plath? Or neither? Or is the point that all great poets take the messy business of their private lives and find a way of transmuting these raw materials into art? Philip Larkin, reviewing Plath’s Collected Poems, recognised this, writing that her final poems were ‘curiously, even jauntily impersonal; it is hard to see how she was labelled confessional.’

Plath herself argued such a thing, when in a 1962 interview with Peter Orr she declared that ‘I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences … with an informed and an intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut-box and mirror looking, narcissistic experience.’ Does this sound like the words of a ‘confessional’ poet, to use the word often crudely applied to Plath’s work?

Similarly, with Eliot, his call for an ‘escape from personality’ is not the same as an escape from the personal altogether. As C. K. Stead argued in The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot, Eliot’s famous argument for poetic impersonality was instead a rejection of the superficial idea of a poet’s ‘personality’ in favour of a deeper and subtler burrowing into the poet’s own self: hardly a wholesale rejection of poetry informed by personal experience.

No, Eliot’s poetry continually reveals how deep-rooted his poems were in his own personal quest for certainty and stability in an increasingly chaotic world. Early poems such as ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ reflect the ‘difficulties with girls’ and general social shyness Eliot and many of his friends and contemporaries experienced while students at Harvard. The Waste Land reflects the breakdown of Eliot’s first marriage and even his nervous breakdown while completing the poem (‘On Margate Sands …’).

And, of course, Four Quartets focus on places which have deeply personal associations for him: Burnt Norton is a house he visited with his former sweetheart Emily Hale, following his separation from his first wife; East Coker is the Somerset village where his ancestors hailed from. When Eliot wrote, ‘In my beginning is my end’, the ‘my’ is clearly referring to him, at least in part. Fittingly, his ashes were interred in St Michael’s Church in East Coker: a beautiful village, if you ever have a chance to undertake a pilgrimage to Eliot’s final resting-place.