Episode Details

How does the poet who defined post-war despair end up writing whimsical verses about magical felines that became a Broadway juggernaut? This episode traces T.S. Eliot from his birth in St. Louis in 1888, where a congenital double hernia kept him out of childhood play and pushed him into books, through Harvard, his discovery of the French symbolists, his loathing of Oxford, and the London meeting with Ezra Pound that launched his career. Along the way we look at his disastrous 1915 marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, her reliance on opium and ether, his own heavy drinking, and the day job in the basement of Lloyds Bank.

Out of that misery came The Waste Land in 1922, a fragmented audio collage of drawing-room neurosis, pub gossip, Sanskrit and jazz that Pound cut ruthlessly and critics hailed as the voice of a traumatized generation, a reading Eliot himself rejected. We follow his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship, the ordered meditations of Four Quartets, his ideas on tradition and the objective correlative, the ongoing scholarly debate over anti-Semitic tropes in his early poems, and the late-life surprises of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats and a secret 6:15 a.m. wedding to Valerie Fletcher in 1957.

• How a frail, isolated childhood beside the Mississippi wired Eliot to experience the world through literature
• Why English poetry lacked a vocabulary for the industrial city, and how Laforgue and Verlaine gave him a structural guide
• Ezra Pound as editor, promoter and the infrastructure behind a supposed lone genius
• The Waste Land as personal cry for help versus generational critique, and the radical stabilizing turn to royalism and high church faith
• The scholarly split between Anthony Julius and Harold Bloom on one side and Craig Raine on the other over prejudice in Eliot's work