After Eliot's unhappy marriage and separation (Vivienne Eliot died in a mental hospital), he was baptized in the Anglican church, and his poetry became more orthodox. Eventually, he could no longer summon the intense concentration of heart, mind and imagination necessary to produce significant poetry, and he subsided into the versifier of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats — ironically, the work by which he is now most widely known in the U.S., thanks to its popularization in the musical Cats. He was a formidably intelligent critic of literature and culture, though he did not escape — any more than we can ourselves — the limitations and prejudices of his time and his upbringing. He sent the stock of the 17th-century poets soaring while arguing against the romantic notion of "self-expression" in favor of a poetry that was severe and classical.

Eliot died in 1965. He chose to be buried in East Coker with his ancestors, remaining the unrepentant exile whose Americanness — his Protestant New England, his St. Louis, his Mississippi River — can be seen better by hindsight than it could when he was alive.

Helen Vendler, who teaches at Harvard, is author of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets

  < < Previous 1 | 2 | 3 | 4