This presentations attempts to explore the autobiographical elements in 'The Waste Land' - the poem by T.S. Eliot - the high priest of the theory of depersonalization.

1. Autobiographical
Elements in ‘The
Waste Land’
T.S. Eliot
26 September 1888 –
4 January 1965

2. Sources:
• Bloom, Harold. The Story Behind the Story. Bloom’s Guides T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. 2007.
Bloom’s Literary Criticism. New York
• Eliot, T.S. Tradition and Individual Talent. The Egoist. 1919.
• Elisa, Dreamwidth.Literary Heritage: T.S. Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965). My
reviews and Ramblings. LGBT reviews and ramblings since 2006. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
<http://reviews-and-ramblings.dreamwidth.org/3418380.html>
• Laity, Cassandra, Nancy K. Gish. Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in T. S. Eliot .Cambridge
University Press; 1ST edition. 2004
• Miller Jr, James E. T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons (1977).
Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Nobelprize.org. Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 28 Oct 2014.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1948/press.html
• Parkar, Rikard A. T.S. Eliot and Jean Verdenal. Exploring The Waste Land. Originally published:
January 1999. Last updated: Sunday, September 29, 2002. Accessed on 28 Oct.
2014. http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/exjean.html
• Wikipedia contributors. "T. S. Eliot." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia, 23 Oct. 2014. Web. 28 Oct. 2014.
• Woods, Gregory. An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture.
Ed. Claude J. Summers. New England Publishing Associates: 2002 >
www.glbtq.com/literature/eliot_ts.html <

3. T.S. Eliot’s poetic creed: High priest of
Depersonalization
• Isn’t it ridiculous to say that T.S. Eliot, who is
high priest of depersonalization and who quite
overtly declared that poet adopts the process of
depersonalization, which is “a continual
surrender of himself as he is at the moment to
something which is more valuable. . . The
progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality.”, is very much
present in the poem
• (Tradition and Individual Talent)

4. T.S. Eliot’s poetic creed: High priest of
Depersonalization
• The poet has, not a "personality" to express, but
a particular medium, which is only a medium and
not a personality, in which impressions and
experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected
ways. Impressions and experiences which are
important for the man may take no place in the
poetry, and those which become important in the
poetry may play quite a negligible part in the
man, the personality.”
• (Tradition and Individual Talent)

5. Finding Eliot in ‘The Waste Land’
• Thus, it is not easy to find an autobiographical
elements in the works of poets like T.S. Eliot.
• Let us make an attempt to explore his life and
the poem with reference to the articles, books
mentioned in the slide ‘Sources’.

6. Some facts about Eliot’s life
• Eliot was born into the Eliot family, a Boston Brahmin family with
roots in England and New England. T.S. Eliot's grandfather William
Greenleaf Eliot had moved to St. Louis, Missouri in order to
establish a Unitarian Church there. His father Henry Ware
Eliot (1843–1919) was a successful businessman. Eliot grew up in
two contrasting geographies and cultures.
• The neighborhood in St. Louis in which the Eliots lived was in
decline, but because of their ties to the city, they did not move to
the suburbs as others of their class did. Thus Eliot was familiar with
the rundown streets of the city and the well to-do drawing rooms
of his parents’ social circle.
• Similarly, although he was raised Unitarian, his nurse, Annie Dunne,
an Irish Catholic, sometimes took him to Mass. These conflicting
influences are apparent in Eliot’s poetry, especially in The Waste
Land, where high and low dialects, popular and classical culture,
and upper and lower class characters are juxtaposed.
• (Wikipedia)

7. Some facts about Eliot’s life
• Among his teachers were the philosopher George
Santayana and Irving Babbitt, an influential
literary scholar and culture critic whose
conservative moral thought generated a
movement called the New Humanism.
• With Santayana he studied allegory and read
Dante in Italian; Babbit introduced him to Eastern
religion, Sanskrit, and French literary criticism.
• Both teachers influenced Eliot’s own austere
political and moral conservatism.
• (Wikipedia)

8. Some facts about Eliot’s life
• In 1909, in the Harvard library, Eliot came across
Arthur Symons’ book, The Symbolist Movement in
Literature.
• At Harvard, too, Eliot met the English philosopher
and mathematician, Bertrand Russell.
• In 1910, Eliot joined the staff of the literary
magazine, The Harvard Advocate.
• Within the circle of its contributors, he
broadened his knowledge of contemporary poets
and poetry, including the poetry of Ezra Pound,
who would shape The Waste Land.

9. Some facts about Eliot’s life
• He also attended the lectures of the
philosopher Henri Bergson at the College de
France.
• In 1915, Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. It
was a disastrous marriage that began badly.
• Soon, however, frustrated by a lack of
affection from her husband, Vivienne allowed
herself to begin a relationship with Russell, of
which Eliot was jealous but also tolerant.

10. Some facts about Eliot’s life
• Several factors are responsible for Eliot's
infatuation with literature during his childhood.
• First, Eliot had to overcome physical limitations as
a child. Struggling from a congenital
double inguinal hernia, Eliot could not participate
in many physical activities and thus was
prevented from interacting socially with his
peers.
• As Eliot was often isolated, his love of literature
developed. Once he learned to read, the young
boy immediately became obsessed with books.

11. Some facts about Eliot’s life
• Secondly, Eliot also credited his hometown with
fuelling his literary vision:
– "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply
than any other environment has ever done. I feel that
there is something in having passed one's childhood
beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those
people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have
been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or
London.“
• Thus, from the onset, literature was an essential part of
Eliot's childhood and both his disability and location
influenced him.

12. Letters reveal the person
• In a private paper written in his sixties, Eliot
confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was
in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to
burn my boats and commit myself to staying in
England. And she persuaded herself (also under
the influence of [Ezra] Pound) that she would
save the poet by keeping him in England. To her,
the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it
brought the state of mind out of which came The
Waste Land. (Eliot, T. S. The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898–1922, p. xvii)
• Virginia Woolf once said: "He was one of those
poets who live by scratching, and his wife was his
itch."

13. The Lost Manuscript of ‘The Waste
Land’
• John Gordan, the curator of the library’s Berg
Collection, out of respect for Eliot, who was still
alive, did not make the acquisition or the
existence of the manuscript public until Eliot died
in 1965. Then Gordan sent a microfilm of the
manuscript to Valerie Fletcher Eliot, Eliot’s widow
and his secretary, and she put together an edition
of the original drafts. It was published as The
Waste Land: Facsimile and Manuscripts of the
Original Drafts in 1971.
• Bloom, Harold. The Story Behind the Story. Bloom’s Guides T.S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land. 2007. Bloom’s Literary Criticism. New York

14. The Lost Manuscript
• Just as the complete manuscript drafts of The
Waste Land made clearer the meaning and
the method of the poem, so, too, have the
biographical details of Eliot’s married and
emotional life in the late teens and early
1920s helped to clarify certain aspects of the
poem. (Bloom)

15. A trivial tease or a serious comment?
• Even though Eliot was known to have said that
the poem represented his own grumblings
rather than a serious social critique, his
primary aesthetic principle of literature, that
the poet should remove himself from his
work, made his observation seem like a tease
rather than a serious comment. (Bloom)

16. Biographical Criticism
• Biographical scholarship emerging at the end
of the twentieth century, however, has
focused on the unhappiness of his first
marriage, particularly on his own sexual
impotence and his wife’s nervous agitation
and sexual promiscuity.
• Bloom, Harold. The Story Behind the Story. Bloom’s Guides T.S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land. 2007. Bloom’s Literary Criticism. New York

17. Is the woman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood,
his wife?
• These factors illuminate, even while not
entirely accounting for, the personalities of
the narrator and of the woman in the first part
of “A Game of Chess”—his diffidence and her
high-strung sensuality.
(Bloom, Harold. The Story Behind the Story.
Bloom’s Guides T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
2007. Bloom’s Literary Criticism. New York)

18. Is the Phlebas, Jean Verdenal, his
friend?
• Similarly, the intensity of Eliot’s friendship
with Jean Verdenal, who was killed in 1915 in
the war, in Paris in 1911 may have affected the
composition of “Death by Water” and the
elegiac (mournful) tone of the poem as a
whole.
• Bloom, Harold. The Story Behind the Story. Bloom’s Guides T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. 2007.
Bloom’s Literary Criticism. New York

19. • In January 1972, as part of a series of letters
to the London Times Literary
Supplement about Eliot's drafts, G. Wilson
Knight made the observation that the so-
called "hyacinth girl" was male.
• Knight expanded upon his observation in an
essay "Thoughts on The Waste Land" (The Denver Quarterly 7 (2):
1–13)later that year.

20. Attempts to depersonalize his personal
emotions and feelings
• Eliot used the circumstances and the emotions of his own
life to invent and give vitality to images which were
partially drawn from his own experiences and yet reflected
a world broader than his own private one. (Bloom)
• But the facts are unearthed by Biographical critics like
– Laity, Cassandra, Nancy K. Gish. Gender, Desire, and Sexuality in
T. S. Eliot
– Miller Jr, James E. T.S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of
the Demons
– Parkar, Rikard A. T.S. Eliot and Jean Verdenal. Exploring The
Waste Land.
– Woods, Gregory. An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual,
Transgender, and Queer Culture

21. Noble Prize: Reinventing the True
Identity of T.S. Eliot as a Poet
• The autobiographical study of Eliot’s The
Waste Land not only deconstructs his theory
of depersonalization but also reveals his true
self. It unmasks the man behind.
• But the discussion would be incomplete if we
do not consider the remarks made during the
Noble Prize award ceremony in 1948.
• (note: the following speech refers to Eliot’s lifetime
contribution to literature and is not solely based on ‘The
Waste Land’)

22. Prior to the speech, Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish
Academy made these remarks:
• “Humility is also the characteristic which you,
Mr. Eliot, have come to regard as man's
virtue. ‹The only wisdom we can hope to
acquire is the wisdom of humility.› At first it
did not appear that this would be the final
result of your visions and your acuity of
thought.
• (Nobelprize.org)

23. Prior to the speech, Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish
Academy made these remarks:
• (The) contact was a shock to you, the
expression of which you brought to
perfection in The Waste Land, in which the
confusion and vulgarity of the civilization
became the object of your scathing criticism.

24. Prior to the speech, Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish
Academy made these remarks:
• But beneath that criticism there lay profound
and painful disillusionment, and out of this
disillusionment there grew forth a feeling of
sympathy, and out of that sympathy was
born a growing urge to rescue from the ruins
of the confusion the fragments from which
order and stability might be restored.
• (Nobelprize.org)

25. T.S. Eliot vs Sigmund Freud
• For Freud the most profound cause of the confusion
lay in the Unbehagen(discomfort,uneasiness) in der
Kultur of modern man. In his opinion there must be
sought a collective and individual balance, which
should constantly take into account man's primitive
instincts. You, Mr. Eliot, are of the opposite opinion.
For you the salvation of man lies in the preservation
of the cultural tradition, which, in our more mature
years, lives with greater vigour within us than does
primitiveness, and which we must preserve if chaos is
to be avoided.
• (Nobelprize.org)

26. Tradition and T.S. Eliot (the Individual)
• Tradition is not a dead load which we drag
along with us, and which in our youthful
desire for freedom we seek to throw off. It is
the soil in which the seeds of coming
harvests are to be sown, and from which
future harvests will be garnered.
• (Nobelprize.org)

27. Conclusion
• It is well said that “Honest criticism and sensitive
appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the
poetry” . . . and . . . “Poetry is not a turning loose of
emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the
expression of personality, but an escape from personality”.
• Consciously, the poet should make such attempts . . . But
the Un/Subconscious is not under the control and
commands of Conscious Mind.
• It finds it outlet in the expression. At the very moment
when, quite consciously, the poet has surrendered itself to
the process of creation, it leaks out – it finds its moment of
expression.
• T.S. Eliot, the high priest of the school of depersonalization
is also not free from the ‘Un/Subconscious overflow of
powerful self . . . Which can only be recollected in
tranquility by the biographical critics’.

28. Acknowledgement for Photographs /Images
• http://lilolia.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/nobel-prize.jpg
• http://standpointmag.co.uk/files/u28/Eliot-and-wife.jpg
• http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/2522/full
• http://cdn.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/ts-
eliot.jpg
• http://www.bookforum.com/uploads/upload.000/id08596/article00.jpg
• http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/medal.html

29. Thank you!
Dilip Barad
Dept. of English,
M.K. Bhavnagar University
Bhavnagar (Gujarat – India)
www.dilipbarad.com
www.dilipbarad.blogspot.in
dilipbarad@gmail.com