Mr. T. S. Eliot, O.M. Obituary Mr. T. S. Eliot, O.M., and Nobel Prizeman, died yesterdlay at his home at the age of 76. He was -the rnost influential English poet of his time. His work had won himn a high reputation, not only throughout the English-speaking world but in all countries where the European tradition, which he himself so faithfully upheld, still flourishes His works in verse and prose have been translated into almost every European language and have been tihe subject of more books and articles than have ever before been published about an author during his lifetime. Thomas Stearns Eliot came of a New England family which had emigrated in the seventeenth century from the Somerset village of East Coker-a village which gave its name to one of his most famous poems and will now give the shelter of its church to his ashes. He was born on September 26, 1888. at St. Louis, Missouri, United States, the younger son of Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Stearns. Apart from some schoolboy verses in the Smith Academy Record, the first of his poems to be printed appeared in the Harvard Advocate (May 24, 1907), a publication of which he was later an editor. At Harvard Eliot was a contemporary of Ezra Pound, to whose poetic example he acknowledged a debt in the dedication of The Waste Land. After taking his degree, Eliot studied in the Graduate School of Philosophy, where his rare intellectual gifts were recognized by his appointment as Assistant in Philosophy (1912-13) and by his election later to the Sheldon Travelling Fellowship in Philosophy, which enabled him to spend an academic year. at Merton College, Oxford. working under Bradley and Joachim. A period of study at the Sorbonne confilmed what was to be a life-long inter- est in French literature. Eliot then made his home in England and lived in London for the rest of his life. He had been a naturalized British subject since 1928. His literary gifts began to be noticed by a discerning few of the " Bloomsbury Group "-among them Maynard Keynes and Virginia Woolf-during the 1914-18 War. At this period his activities included the assistant editorship of the Egoist (1917-19), teaching at Highgate Junior School, lecturing to L.C.C. evening classes, and reviewing; from 1919 onwards he contributed to Tlze T7imes Literary Supplement a memor- able series of articles on the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists. These and some earlier reviews were collected in The Sacred Wood (1920), a volume which marked him out as a critic well equipped and per- spIcuous, provocative if something ' don- nish " in manner. His position in the world of letters was thus assured. His first poems to appear in book form had been printed in Pound's Catholic Antho- logy (1915); Prufrock was issued separately in 1917: and in 1919 some 200 copies of Poemns were hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press. IN LLOYDS BANK After the war, which ended as he was about to be commissioned in the U.S. Navy, he was employed at Lloyds Bank in Cornhill, where it was his business to prepare the bank's monthly report on foreign affairs. His City career came to an end in 1922, when he was appointed the first editor of the Criterion, which he directed until it ceased publication in 1939. In its first issue appeared The Waste Land, which announced the arrival of a major poet and, by the mingled enthusiasm and execration with which it was received. the impact of an original talent. Its presenta- tion of disillusionment and the disintegra- tion of values, catching the mood of the time, made it the poetic gospel of the post- war intelligentsia; at the time, however, few either of its detractors or its admirers saw through the surface innovations and the language of despair to the deep respect for tradition and the keen moral sense which underlay thern. In 1925 he joined the board of Faber's, where he was responsible during the next 40 years for the publication of much of the most important poetry of our tirne, and was a source of counsel and encourage- ment to many younger poets. His own later works included Ash Wednesday (1930). Four Quartets (1943), the poetic dramas, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959), and several vrolumes of collected essays and addresses. It was in one of these, For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), that Eliot had announced his allegiance to the Church of England. He at once became a leading and influen-- tial layman of the Anglo-Catholic per- suasion, engaging in vigorous, but always closely reasoned, controversy upon matters of doctrine and ritual, especially after the Lambeth and Malvern conferences and during the contentions over Church Union in South India. Eliot's attitude in ecclesi- astical affairs was dogmatically, even intransigently, conservative: there was perhaps a certain intolerance here in his zealous but uncompromising defence of tradition. He was a devoted churchwarden, and an active but discreet propagandist. His most imposing work of a purely religious character appeared in 1939 as The Idea of a Christian Society. ANGLO-CATHOLIC TRADMON Of the non-literary infiuences which most contributed to Eliot's poetic development his religion must be put first. The fas- tidiousness, the moral taste, and the intel- lectual severity, which were a legacy of his New England ancestors, merged with the Anglo-Catholic tradition to direct his poetry ever farther in the exploration of spiritual awareness, the search for spiritual values. From The Waste Land and The Hollow Men, through Journey of the Magi and Ash Wednesday, to the Four Quartets there ran a steady line of development towards the positive treatment of religious experience, so that he could say in the last-named work that "the poetry does not matter" while leaving the reader in no doubt as to its strictly poetic integrity. At the same time, a long-drawn-out private tragedy which darkened his middle years left a deep im- pression on his poetry: the rawness, the shuddering distaste. the sense of contagion, the dry despair which emerge from certain passages of Ash Wednesday, for instance, and The Family Reunion. are traces of it. But for this emotional wound. so long un- healed, his poetry might well have been more genial, less ascetic; but, equally, it might well have been-less intense. Eliot's chief literary influences were the French Symbolists and, above all, Dante. But, both as poet and critic he drew deep from the whole European tradition which, as editor of the Criterion. he bad sought to preserve and reinvigorate. His poetry, each poem ' a raid on the inarticulate ". strove incessantly towards greater purity of utterance and wider integration of experi- ence, just as it displayed an increasing mastery of those personal rhythms, some- times colloquial, sometimes hieratically formal, which he developed from the blank verse line. Technically, his influence over younger English poets was for many years marked and widespread. No English poet since Wordsworth had so constantly, so unequivocally or so openly insisted upon absolute self-dedication to the art, or approached it with greater humility. A critic truly said of him: " In struggling towards a discipline of spirit through a discipline of language, Eliot has reaffirmed in his own practice the value of poetry." The quality of his writing was in- separable, to those who knew him, from the integrty of his character. In public Eliot, a stooping, sombre-clad figure, appeared to be shy and retiring, formal in his manner. which was courtly and atten- tive, but detached. The impertinence of the curious, the sometimes intemperate attentions of admirers, he kept alike at arm's length by a playful, evasive wit. With his intimate friends he enjoyed banter and jokes-even, in earlier days, practical jokes. Although, in his earlier verse and prose, he often gave the imPression of having been born middle-aged, he remained very youthful in some of his responses: children were devoted to " Old Possum ", and relished his elaborate and agreeably mystifying fun, which found such ingenious and rhythmically diverse expression in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. He was, above all, a humble man; firm, even stub- born at times, but with no self-importance; quite unspoilt by fame; free from spiritual or intellectual pride. POETIC DRAMA REvIVAL Eliot's chief preoccupation since the mid- 1930s was the revival of poetic drama. By precept and example he strove to restore to the English stage a form of writing with- out which. he believed, drama could never express the full range of human sensibility. His entry into the theatre was made with characteristic deliberation, step by step, each preparing for the next. His first experiment, in Sweeney Agonistes (1932)- two brilliant " Fragments" of an Aristo- phanic melodrama-was never fully exploited. Its dramatic possibilities were barely explored in The Rock (1934), a commissioned work, something between a conventional pageant and an ecclesiastical revue and chiefly dis- tinguished for its liturgical choruses. Murder in the Cathedral. first performed in the Chapter House at Canterbury in 1935, explored these possibilities to some purpose and became a theatrical success both here and in America and later (in translation) on the Continent. The play's effectiveness as drama is attested by the number of times it has been revived, but Eliot himself considered that its verse had only the negative merit of avoiding any echo of Shakespeare. Thze Family Reunion (1939), the most wholly poetic of his plays, was the first of four dramas of modern domestic life whose basic theme is derived from Greek tragedy. It was also the first in which he perfected by a masterly use of the stressed line, an instrument which successfully captured the cadence and rhythm of everyday con- versation in verse and passed, without breaking its own texture, from small talk to the statement of profundities. With this instrument he fashioned The Cocktail Party, which in 1949 and the following year had a remarkable success on both sides of the Atlantic. The Cocktail Party chatter, light, easy, amusing, was gaily decorated with the sprightly extravagances that make in the theatre the effect of wit; and at the same time the play told the story of four people, emotionally interlocked, who discover their appropriate forms of salvation after the impact of a shaking experience. Not all Eliot's followers shared the public's enthusiasm. They felt that he had adhereed all too closely to his self-imposed rule to avoid poetry which could not stand the test of dramatic utility. And even those who appreciated the practical value of the rule in the existing state of the theatre still hoped that the next play might more boldly seize new ground for the poetic drama. But in The Confidential Clerk, which came in 1953, Eliot seemed to have relinquished some of the ground he had won at least for dramatic poetry. The poetic overtones this time were fainter, for the comedy sought to hold audiences through laughter and surprise andt there were lesser demands on feelirg. The falling off went unchecked in his last play, rlhe Elder Statesman (1959) which failed to hold the stage. Yet no dramatist of our time has come anore fibrnly to grips with the conditions which the theatre imposes onwpoetry. Verse, and prose, he saw clearly, were but means to an end-the rendering whole of an imagined reaity in terms of the stage. It may well be that Murder in the Cathedral will come inr the end to have a longer life than the latei*.experiments. But, in spite of their weaknesses of construction and characterization, there is the precision, the personal yet efxquisite and unobtrusive rhythm, of the (dialogue to keep them in mind and to offsSt the somewhat chill sense they give of moving in a kind of emotional twilight. After the 1939-4 War Eliot's work out- side the theatre was confined to the writing of lectures and addresses for various occa- sions -at home and abroad, many of them in connexion. with the/bestowal of honorary degrees, prizes, and ather official tributes. He was never revisited in his later years by the inspiration th-t produced Four Quartets, his greatest poetic achievement. He received; many honours and awards: the Order of Merit and" the Nobel Prize for Literature, both in 1948: the Legion d'Honneur; the Hanseatic Goethe Prize (1954); honorary doctorat4s from 16 uni- versities in Great Britain, Europe, and the UTnited States. He was an Honorary Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and of Merton College, Oxford. Among his many appointments he was Clark Lecturer at Trinity College. Cam- bridge (1925), Charles Eliot Norton Visiting Professor at Harvard (1932-33); president of the Classical Association (1942); first president of the Virgil Society (1944); president of the London Library (1952). He married in 1917 Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who died after a long illness in 1947. In 1957, his seventieth year, he married secondly Miss E. V. Fletcher. There were no children of either marriage. MR. T. S. ELIOT, O.M. THE MOST INFLUENTIAL ENGLISH POET OF HIS TIME