Biographical Themes in T. S. Eliot's Early Poetry

Throughout his career, T. S. Eliot developed his central poetic doctrine, the theory of poetic impersonality. Because of the importance of this theory to Eliot, a question is raised about its importance to his own poetry. Some recent critics, examining Eliot's poetry in the light of his memoirs and biographies, have found that Eliot was not governed by his theory. My thesis is designed to continue this investigation which so far has been done incompletely and randomly. This investigation finds that Eliot suffered from a congenital double hernia, from his disastrous first marriage, and from general poor health. Furthermore, in his early major poems, Eliot develops the themes of alienation, sterile sexuality, and conversion, which emerge from these biographical elements. Thus, in fact, Eliot is not impersonal in his poetry, but expresses indirectly his own suffering.