Born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888, Eliot studied at Harvard and Oxford before abandoning his postgraduate studies at Oxford because he preferred the exciting literary society of London. Nevertheless, his poetry changed the landscape of Anglophone poetry for good. Even in his most famous poems we can often detect the rhythms of iambic pentameter – that quintessentially English verse line – and in other respects, such as his respect for the literary tradition, Eliot is a more ‘conservative’ poet than a radical. Modernist poets often embraced free verse, but Eliot had a more guarded view, believing that all good poetry had the ‘ghost’ of a metre behind the lines. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915), The Waste Land (1922), and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925) assuring him a place in the ‘canon’ of modernist poetry. Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) is regarded as one of the most important and influential poets of the twentieth century, with poems like ‘The Love Song of J. And one can only shudder at what Emily Hale, the indirect model for Celia, must have felt when she saw it. It remains a problematic revelation because, even for many Christian theatregoers, it probably smacks of over-egging the religious symbolism. But Eliot clearly thought that self-sacrifice was a cornerstone of Christianity, and Celia’s immolation is loaded with significance. Why does Celia have to die at the end? And what is the symbolic role of her death in the play? Why is she apparently crucified? Many original theatre-goers were shocked and repulsed by this part of the play, deeming it gratuitous. Eliot, that a play is a less personal form than a poem (for some reason we always assume a poem is about the poet, whereas we don’t do this with a piece of drama), and so – paradoxically – Eliot was able to make his plays more autobiographical precisely because people didn’t expect them to be personal.Ī few troubling questions remain about The Cocktail Party – questions which cannot be neatly resolved by analysis of the text. Lyndall Gordon remarks in her biography of Eliot, The Imperfect Life of T. Eliot’s plays are, in a sense, more clearly autobiographical than his poetry.

The Cocktail Party by T.S. Eliot