Magi (Latin plural of ''magus''; Ancient Greek ''μάγος'' (''magos''); Old Persian (''maguš'') (Modern Persian مغ (''mogh'')); Arabic مجوس; English singular ''magian'', ''mage'', ''magus'', ''magusian'', ''magusaean'') is a term, used since at least the 4th century BC, to denote a follower of Zoroaster, or rather, a follower of what the Hellenistic world associated Zoroaster with, which was – in the main – the ability to read the stars, and manipulate the fate that the stars foretold. The meaning prior to Hellenistic period is uncertain.

Pervasive throughout the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia until late antiquity and beyond, Greek ''mágos'', "Magian" or "magician," was influenced by (and eventually displaced) Greek ''goēs''(γόης), the older word for a practitioner of magic, to include astrology, alchemy and other forms of esoteric knowledge. This association was in turn the product of the Hellenistic fascination for (Pseudo-)Zoroaster, who was perceived by the Greeks to be the "Chaldean" "founder" of the Magi and "inventor" of both astrology and magic. Among the skeptical thinkers of the period, the term 'magian' acquired a negative connotation and was associated with tricksters and conjurers. This pejorative meaning survives in the words "magic" and "magician".

In English, the term "magi" is most commonly used in reference to the Gospel of Matthew's "wise men from the East", or "three wise men", though that number does not actually appear in Matthew's account. The plural "magi" entered the English language around 1200, in reference to the Biblical magi of . The singular appears considerably later, in the late 14th century, when it was borrowed from Old French in the meaning ''magician'' together with ''magic''.

Pre-4th century BC usage

In Greek sources

The perhaps oldest surviving reference to the magi – from Greek μάγος (''mágos'', plural: ''magoi'') – is from 6th century BC Heraclitus (apud Clemens ''Protrepticus 12''), who curses the magi for their "impious" rites and rituals. A description of the rituals that Heraclitus refers to has not survived, and there is nothing to suggest that Heraclitus was referring to foreigners.

Better preserved are the descriptions of the mid-5th century BC Herodotus, who in his portrayal of the Iranian expatriates living in Asia minor uses the term "magi" in two different senses. In the first sense (''Histories'' 1.101), Herodotus speaks of the magi as one of the tribes/peoples (''ethnous'') of the Medes. In another sense (1.132), Herodotus uses the term "magi" to generically refer to a "sacerdotal caste", but "whose ethnic origin is never again so much as mentioned." According to Robert Charles Zaehner, in other accounts, "we hear of Magi not only in Persia, Parthia, Bactria, Chorasmia, Aria, Media, and among the Sakas, but also in non-Iranian lands like Samaria, Ethiopia, and Egypt. Their influence was also widespread throughout Asia Minor. It is, therefore, quite likely that the sacerdotal caste of the Magi was distinct from the Median tribe of the same name."

Other Greek sources from before the Hellenistic period include the gentleman-soldier Xenophon, who had first-hand experience at the Persian Achaemenid court. In his early 4th century BC ''Cyropaedia'', the Athenian depicts the magians as authorities for all religious matters (8.3.11), and imagines the magians to be responsible for the education of the emperor-to-be.

In Iranian sources

Avestan 'magâunô', i.e. the religious caste of the Medes which Zoroaster was born into, (see Yasna 33.7:' ýâ sruyê parê magâunô ' = ' so I can be heard beyond Magi '), seems to be the origin of the term.

The term only appears twice in Iranian texts from before the 4th century BC, and only one of these can be dated with precision. This one instance occurs in the trilingual Behistun inscription of Darius I, and which can be dated to about 520 BC. In this trilingual text, certain rebels have 'magian' as an attribute; in the Old Persian portion as ''maγu-'' (generally assumed to be a loan word from Median). The meaning of the term in this context is uncertain.

The other instance appears in the texts of the Avesta, i.e. in the sacred literature of Zoroastrianism. In this instance, which is in the Younger Avestan portion, the term appears in the hapax ''moghu.tbiš'', meaning "hostile to the ''moghu''", where ''moghu'' does not (as was previously thought) mean "magus", but rather "a member of the tribe" or referred to a particular social class in the proto-Iranian language and then continued to do so in Avestan.

An unrelated term, but previously assumed to be related, appears in the older Gathic Avestan language texts. This word, adjectival ''magavan'' meaning "possessing ''maga-''", was once the premise that Avestan ''maga-'' and Median (i.e. Old Persian) ''magu-'' were co-eval (and also that both these were cognates of Vedic Sanskrit ''magha-''). While "in the Gathas the word seems to mean both the teaching of Zoroaster and the community that accepted that teaching," and it seems that Avestan ''maga-'' is related to Sanskrit ''magha-'', "there is no reason to suppose that the western Iranian form ''magu'' (Magus) has exactly the same meaning" as well.

But it "may be, however," that Avestan ''moghu'' (which is not the same as Avestan ''maga-'') "and Medean ''magu'' were the same word in origin, a common Iranian term for 'member of the tribe' having developed among the Medes the special sense of 'member of ''the'' (priestly) tribe', hence a priest."^''cf''

4th century BC onwards

In Graeco-Roman sources

As early as the 5th century BC, Greek ''magos'' had spawned ''mageia'' and ''magike'' to describe the activity of a magus, that is, it was his or her art and practice. But almost from the outset the noun for the action and the noun for the actor parted company. Thereafter, ''mageia'' was used not for what actual magi did, but for something related to the word 'magic' in the modern sense, i.e. using supernatural means to achieve an effect in the natural world, or the appearance of achieving these effects through trickery or sleight of hand. The early Greek texts typically have the pejorative meaning, which in turn influenced the meaning of ''magos'' to denote a conjurer and a charlatan. Already in the mid-5th century BC, Herodotus identifies the ''magi'' as interpreters of omens and dreams (''Histories'' 7.19, 7.37, 1.107, 1.108, 1.120, 1.128).

Once the magi had been associated with "magic"—Greek ''magikos''—it was but a natural progression that the Greek's image of Zoroaster would metamorphose into a magician too. The first century Pliny the elder names "Zoroaster" as the inventor of magic (''Natural History'' xxx.2.3), but a "principle of the division of labor appears to have spared Zoroaster most of the responsibility for introducing the dark arts to the Greek and Roman worlds. That dubious honor went to another fabulous magus, Ostanes, to whom most of the pseudepigraphic magical literature was attributed." For Pliny, this magic was a "monstrous craft" that gave the Greeks not only a "lust" (''aviditatem'') for magic, but a downright "madness" (''rabiem'') for it, and Pliny supposed that Greek philosophers—among them Pythagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, and Plato—traveled abroad to study it, and then returned to teach it (xxx.2.8-10).

"Zoroaster" – or rather what the Greeks supposed him to be – was for the Hellenists the figurehead of the 'magi', and the founder of that order (or what the Greeks considered to be an order). He was further projected as the author of a vast compendium of "Zoroastrian" pseudepigrapha, composed in the main to discredit the texts of rivals. "The Greeks considered the best wisdom to be exotic wisdom" and "what better and more convenient authority than the distant — temporally and geographically — Zoroaster?" The subject of these texts, the authenticity of which was rarely challenged, ranged from treatises on nature to ones on necromancy. But the bulk of these texts dealt with astronomical speculations and magical lore.

One factor for the association with astrology was Zoroaster's name, or rather, what the Greeks made of it. Within the scheme of Greek thinking (which was always on the lookout for hidden significances and "real" meanings of words) his name was identified at first with star-worshiping (''astrothytes'' "star sacrificer") and, with the ''Zo-'', even as the ''living'' star. Later, an even more elaborate mytho-etymology evolved: Zoroaster died by the living (''zo-'') flux (''-ro-'') of fire from the star (''-astr-'') which he himself had invoked, and even, that the stars killed him in revenge for having been restrained by him.

The second, and "more serious" factor for the association with astrology was the notion that Zoroaster was a Chaldean. The alternate Greek name for Zoroaster was Zaratas/Zaradas/Zaratos (''cf.'' Agathias 2.23-5, Clement ''Stromata'' I.15), which—so Bidez and Cumont—derived from a Semitic form of his name. The Pythagorean tradition considered the "founder" of their order to have studied with Zoroaster in Chaldea (Porphyry ''Life of Pythagoras'' 12, Alexander Polyhistor apud Clement's ''Stromata'' I.15, Diodorus of Eritrea, Aristoxenus apud Hippolitus VI32.2). Lydus (''On the Months'' II.4) attributes the creation of the seven-day week to "the Chaldeans in the circle of Zoroaster and Hystaspes," and who did so because there were seven planets. The Suda's chapter on ''astronomia'' notes that the Babylonians learned their astrology from Zoroaster. Lucian of Samosata (''Mennipus'' 6) decides to journey to Babylon "to ask one of the magi, Zoroaster's disciples and successors," for their opinion.

In Chinese sources

Victor H. Mair provides archaeological and linguistic evidence suggesting that Chinese ''wū'' (巫 "shaman; witch, wizard; magician", Old Chinese *''m^yag'') was a loanword from Old Persian *''maguš'' "magician; magi". He describes: :The recent discovery at an early Chou site of two figurines with unmistakably Caucasoid or Europoid feature is startling prima facie evidence of East-West interaction during the first half of the first millennium Before the Current Era. It is especially interesting that one of the figurines bears on the top of his head the clearly incised graph ☩ which identifies him as a ''wu'' (< *''m^yag'').

These figurines, which are dated circa 8th century BC, were discovered during a 1980 excavation of a Zhou Dynasty palace in Fufeng County (Shaanxi Province).

Mair connects the ancient Bronzeware script for ''wu'' 巫 "shaman" (a cross with potents) with a Western heraldic symbol of magicians, the cross potent ☩, which "can hardly be attributable to sheer coincidence or chance independent origination."

Compared with the linguistic reconstructions of many Indo-European languages, the current reconstruction of Old (or "Archaic") Chinese is more provisional. This velar final ''-g'' in Mair's *''m^yag'' (巫) is evident in several Old Chinese reconstructions (Dong Tonghe's *''m^ywag'', Zhou Fagao's *''mjwaγ'', and Li Fanggui's *''mjag''), but not all (Bernhard Karlgren's *''m^ywo'' and Axel Schuessler's *''ma'').

In Semitic sources

In Arabic texts of the Islamic period, Zoroaster is – as in Greco-Roman tradition also – "founder" of the magians, Arabic ''majusya''.

The Koranic word المجوس (Koran 22:17) refers to the Zoroastrians.

In the 1980s, ''majus'' was part of Iraqi propaganda vocabulary of the Iran–Iraq War to refer to Iranians in general. "By referring to the Iranians in these documents as ''majus'', the security apparatus [implied] that the Iranians [were] not sincere Muslims, but rather covertly practice their pre-Islamic beliefs. Thus, in their eyes, Iraq's war took on the dimensions of not only a struggle for Arab nationalism, but also a campaign in the name of Islam."

In Christian tradition

The word ''mágos'' (Greek) and its variants appears in both the Old and New Testaments. Ordinarily this word is translated "magician" in the sense of illusionist or fortune-teller, and this is how it is translated in all of its occurrences except for the Gospel of Matthew, where it is rendered "wise man". However, early church fathers, such as St. Justin, Origen, St. Augustine and St. Jerome, did not make an exception for the Gospel, and translated the word in its ordinary sense, i.e. as "magician".

The Gospel of Matthew states that magi visited the infant Jesus shortly after his birth (). The gospel describes how magi from the east were notified of the birth of a king in Judaea by the appearance of his star. Upon their arrival in Jerusalem, they visited King Herod to determine the location of where the king of the Jews had been born. Herod, disturbed, told them that he had not heard of the child, but informed them of a prophecy that the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. He then asked the magians to inform him when they find the infant so that Herod may also worship him. Guided by the Star of Bethlehem, the wise men found the baby Jesus in a house in Bethlehem, worshiped him, and presented him with "gifts of gold and of frankincense and of myrrh." (2.11) In a dream they are warned not to return to Herod, and therefore return to their homes by taking another route. Since its composition in the late 1st century, numerous apocryphal stories have embellished the gospel's account.

In addition to the more famous story of Simon Magus found in chapter 8, the ''Book of Acts'' () also describes another magus who acted as an advisor of Sergius Paulus, the Roman proconsul at Paphos on the island of Cyprus. He was a Jew named Bar-Jesus (son of Jesus), or alternatively Elymas. (Another Cypriot magus named Atomos is referenced by Josephus, working at the court of Felix at Caesarea.)

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn used the title of "Magus" to refer to the second-highest level of attainment in their degree system. This system, with associated titles, would later be adopted by Aleister Crowley for his occult order A∴A∴, wherein the title "Magus" designated the highest attainable grade of magic (Moses, Buddha, and Lao Tzu being some examples of those who attained this grade). To be a Magi means to journey to give gifts.

See also

Anachitis - "stone of necessity" - stone used to call up spirits from water, used by Magi in antiquity.

References

External links

.

The Magi in Medieval Mosaics, Sculptures, Tympanums and Art

The Ancient Order of the Culdees of Iona

Category:Astrologers Category:History of astrology Category:Magic (paranormal) Magi Category:Religious Christmas

ar:الموغيون de:Mager fa:مغ fr:Mage hr:Magi hy:Մոգ io:Mago it:Re Magi ko:마기 nl:Magiër ja:マギ pl:Mag (kapłan perski) pt:Mago ru:Маг fi:Maagi

name	T. S. Eliot
birth name	Thomas Stearns Eliot
birth date	September 26, 1888
birth place	St. Louis, Missouri
death date	January 04, 1965
death place	London, England
occupation	Poet, dramatist, literary critic
citizenship	American by birth; British from 1927
education	A.B. in philosophy
alma mater	Harvard UniversityMerton College, Oxford
period	1905–1965
movement	Modernism
spouse	Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Vivien) (1915–1947); Esmé Valerie Fletcher (1957–1965)
children	none
awards	Nobel Prize for Literature (1948), Order of Merit (1948)
notableworks	''The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'' (1915), ''The Waste Land'' (1922), ''Four Quartets'' (1944)
influences	Dante Alighieri, Matthew Arnold, Jules Laforgue, John Donne, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Charles Baudelaire
influenced	Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, Allen Tate, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney
signature	TS Eliot Signature.svg }}

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.

The poem that made his name, ''The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock''—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement. He followed this with what have become some of the best-known poems in the English language, including ''Gerontion'' (1920), ''The Waste Land'' (1922), ''The Hollow Men'' (1925), ''Ash Wednesday'' (1930), and ''Four Quartets'' (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly ''Murder in the Cathedral'' (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

Life

Early life and education

Eliot was born into the Eliot family, a bourgeois family originally from New England, who had moved to St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis. Eliot credits his hometown with seeding his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London." His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843–1929), wrote poetry and was a social worker, a new profession in the early 20th century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children; his parents were both 44 years old when he was born. His four sisters were between 11 and 19 years older; his brother was eight years older. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather Thomas Stearns.

From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was 14 under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's ''Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam'', a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing, and he destroyed them. His oldest surviving poem, an untitled lyric, dates from January 1905. The first poem that he showed anyone, "A Fable For Feasters," was written as a school exercise when he was 15, and was published in the ''Smith Academy Record'', and later in ''The Harvard Advocate'', Harvard University's student magazine. He also published three short stories in 1905, including "The Man Who Was King", which reflects his exploration of Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis.

After graduation, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer, who would later publish ''The Waste Land''. He studied philosophy at Harvard from 1906 to 1909, earning his bachelor's degree after three years, instead of the usual four. Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908, when he discovered Arthur Symons's ''The Symbolist Movement in Literature'' (1899). This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book ''Les amours jaunes'', a work that affected the course of Eliot's life. The ''Harvard Advocate'' published some of his poems, and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken, the American novelist.

After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909–1910, Eliot moved to Paris, where from 1910–1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Alain-Fournier. From 1911–1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford in 1914. He first visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer program, but when the First World War broke out, he went to Oxford instead. At the time, so many American students attended Merton that the Junior Common Room proposed a motion "that this society abhors the Americanization of Oxford"; it was defeated by two votes after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture.

Eliot did not settle at Merton, and left after a year. He wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead." By 1916, he had completed a PhD dissertation for Harvard on ''Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley'', but he failed to return for the ''viva voce'' exam.

Marriage

In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote, "I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society)." Less than four months later, Thayer introduced Eliot to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess. They were married at Hampstead Register Office on June 26, 1915.

After a short visit alone to his family in the United States, Eliot returned to London and took several teaching jobs, such as lecturing at Birkbeck College, University of London. The philosopher Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars have suggested that she and Russell had an affair, but the allegations were never confirmed. In a private paper written in his sixties, Eliot confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of [Ezra] Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came ''The Waste Land''." (Their relationship was the subject of a 1984 play ''Tom and Viv'', which in 1994 was adapted as a film.)

Teaching, Lloyds, Faber and Faber

After leaving Merton, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably at Highgate School, a private school in London, where he taught French and Latin—his students included the young John Betjeman. Later he taught at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, a state school in Buckinghamshire. To earn extra money, he wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses. In 1917, he took a position at Lloyds Bank in London, working on foreign accounts. On a trip to Paris in August 1920, he met the writer James Joyce and the artist Wyndham Lewis. Eliot said he found Joyce arrogant—Joyce doubted Eliot's ability as a poet at the time—but the two soon became friends, with Eliot's visiting Joyce whenever he was in Paris.

In 1925, Eliot left Lloyds to join the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber, where he remained for the rest of his career, eventually becoming a director. Wyndham Lewis and Eliot became close friends, a friendship leading to Lewis's well-known painting of Eliot in 1938.

Conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship

On June 29, 1927 Eliot converted to Anglicanism from Unitarianism, and in November that year he took British citizenship. He became a warden of his parish church, Saint Stephen's, Gloucester Road, London, and a life member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr. He specifically identified as Anglo-Catholic, proclaiming himself "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic [sic] in religion." About thirty years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament."

Separation and remarriage

By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. When Harvard offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932-1933 academic year, he accepted and left Vivienne in England. Upon his return, he arranged for a formal separation from her, avoiding all but one meeting with her between his leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947. Vivienne was committed to the Northumberland House mental hospital, Stoke Newington, in 1938, and remained there until she died. Although Eliot was still legally her husband, he never visited her.

From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat with his friend John Davy Hayward, who gathered and archived Eliot's papers, styling himself "Keeper of the Eliot Archive." Hayward also collected Eliot's pre-Prufrock verse, commercially published after Eliot's death as ''Poems Written in Early Youth''. When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge in 1965.

On January 10, 1957, Eliot at the age of 68 married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 32. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ceremony was held in a church at 6.15 a.m. with virtually no one in attendance other than his wife's parents. Since Eliot's death, Valerie has dedicated her time to preserving his legacy; she has edited and annotated ''The Letters of T. S. Eliot'' and a facsimile of the draft of ''The Waste Land''. In the early 1960s, by then in failing health, Eliot worked as an editor for the Wesleyan University Press, seeking new poets in Europe for publication.

Death and honours

Eliot died of emphysema in London on January 4, 1965. For many years he had had health problems caused by his heavy smoking, and had often been laid low with bronchitis or tachycardia. He was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. In accordance with Eliot's wishes, his ashes were taken to St Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from which his ancestors had emigrated to America.

A wall plaque commemorates him with a quotation from his poem "East Coker": "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning."

In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, Eliot was commemorated by the installation of a large stone in the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey. The stone, cut by designer Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates, his Order of Merit, and a quotation from his poem "Little Gidding": "the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living."

Poetry

For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small amount of poetry and he was aware of this early in his career. He wrote to J. H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."

Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small books or pamphlets, and then collected them in books. His first collection was ''Prufrock and Other Observations'' (1917). In 1920, he published more poems in ''Ara Vos Prec'' (London) and ''Poems: 1920'' (New York). These had the same poems (in a different order) except that "Ode" in the British edition was replaced with "Hysteria" in the American edition. In 1925, he collected ''The Waste Land'' and the poems in ''Prufrock'' and ''Poems'' into one volume and added ''The Hollow Men'' to form ''Poems: 1909–1925''. From then on, he updated this work as ''Collected Poems''. Exceptions are ''Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'' (1939), a collection of light verse; ''Poems Written in Early Youth'', posthumously published in 1967 and consisting mainly of poems published 1907–1910 in ''The Harvard Advocate'', and ''Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917'', material Eliot never intended to have published, which appeared posthumously in 1997.

Eliot said of his nationality and its role in his work: "[M]y poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England ... It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good ... if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America."

''The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock''

In 1915 Ezra Pound, overseas editor of ''Poetry'' magazine, recommended to Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Although the character Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only 22. Its now-famous opening lines, comparing the evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table," were considered shocking and offensive, especially at a time when Georgian Poetry was hailed for its derivations of the 19th century Romantic Poets. The poem follows the conscious experience of a man, Prufrock (relayed in the "stream of consciousness" form characteristic of the Modernists), lamenting his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, with the recurrent theme of carnal love unattained. Critical opinion is divided as to whether the narrator leaves his residence during the course of the narration. The locations described can be interpreted either as actual physical experiences, mental recollections, or as symbolic images from the sub-conscious mind, as, for example, in the refrain "In the room the women come and go." The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri, in the Italian, and refers to a number of literary works, including ''Hamlet'' and those of the French Symbolists.

Its reception in London can be gauged from an unsigned review in ''The Times Literary Supplement'' on June 21, 1917: "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to ''poetry''…"

''The Waste Land''

In October 1922 Eliot published ''The Waste Land'' in ''The Criterion''. Eliot's dedication to ''il miglior fabbro'' ("the better craftsman") refers to Ezra Pound's significant hand in editing and reshaping the poem from a longer Eliot manuscript to the shortened version that appears in publication. It was composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot—his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders. The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. Before the poem's publication as a book in December 1922, Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair. On November 15, 1922, he wrote to Richard Aldington, saying, "As for ''The Waste Land'', that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style." The poem is known for its obscure nature—its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. Despite this, it has become a touchstone of modern literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year, James Joyce's ''Ulysses''. Among its best-known phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and "Shantih shantih shantih," the Sanskrit ''mantra'' that ends the poem.

''The Hollow Men''

''The Hollow Men'' appeared in 1925. For the critic Edmund Wilson, it marked "the nadir of the phase of despair and desolation given such effective expression in ''The Waste Land''." It is Eliot's major poem of the late twenties. Similar to other work, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary: post-war Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised); the difficulty of hope and religious conversion; and Eliot's failed marriage.

Allen Tate perceived a shift in Eliot's method, writing that, "The mythologies disappear altogether in ''The Hollow Men''." This is a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante as anything else in Eliot’s early work, to say little of the modern English mythology—the "Old Guy Fawkes" of the Gunpowder Plot—or the colonial and agrarian mythos of Joseph Conrad and James George Frazer, which, at least for reasons of textual history, echo in ''The Waste Land''. The "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" that is so characteristic of his mythical method remained in fine form. ''The Hollow Men'' contains some of Eliot's most famous lines, notably its conclusion:

''This is the way the world ends'' ''This is the way the world ends'' ''This is the way the world ends'' ''Not with a bang but a whimper.''

''Ash Wednesday''

''Ash Wednesday'' is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem," it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. The style is different from the poetry that predates his conversion. ''Ash Wednesday'' and the poems that followed had a more casual, melodic, and contemplative method.

Many critics were particularly enthusiastic about it. Edwin Muir maintained that it is one of the most moving poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect," though it was not well-received by everyone. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of the more secular ''literati''.

''Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats''

In 1930, Eliot published a book of light verse, ''Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'' ("Old Possum" was Ezra Pound's nickname for him). This first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover. In 1954, the composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems for speaker and orchestra, in a work entitled ''Practical Cats''. After Eliot's death, the book was adapted as the basis of the musical, ''Cats'', by Andrew Lloyd Webber, first produced in London's West End in 1981 and opening on Broadway the following year.

''Four Quartets''

Eliot regarded ''Four Quartets'' as his masterpiece, and it is the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: ''Burnt Norton'' (1936), ''East Coker'' (1940), ''The Dry Salvages'' (1941) and ''Little Gidding'' (1942). Each has five sections. Although they resist easy characterization, each begins with a rumination on the geographical location of its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation to the human condition. Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements: air, earth, water, and fire.

''Burnt Norton'' asks what it means to consider things that might have been. We see the shell of an abandoned house, and Eliot toys with the idea that all these merely possible realities are present together, invisible to us. All the possible ways people might walk across a courtyard add up to a vast dance we can't see; children who aren't there are hiding in the bushes.

Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden.

''East Coker'' continues the examination of time and meaning, focusing in a famous passage on the nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope".

''The Dry Salvages'' treats the element of water, via images of river and sea. It strives to contain opposites: "... the past and future/Are conquered, and reconciled".

''Little Gidding'' (the element of fire) is the most anthologized of the Quartets. Eliot's experiences as an air raid warden in The Blitz power the poem, and he imagines meeting Dante during the German bombing. The beginning of the Quartets ("Houses .../Are removed, destroyed") had become a violent everyday experience; this creates an animation, where for the first time he talks of Love as the driving force behind all experience. From this background, the Quartets end with an affirmation of Julian of Norwich: "all shall be well and/All manner of thing shall be well".

The ''Four Quartets'' cannot be understood without reference to Christian thought, traditions, and history. Eliot draws upon the theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, and mystics St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich. The "deeper communion" sought in ''East Coker'', the "hints and whispers of children, the sickness that must grow worse in order to find healing," and the exploration which inevitably leads us home all point to the pilgrim's path along the road of sanctification.

Plays

With the important exception of his ''magnum opus'' ''Four Quartets'', Eliot directed much of his creative energies after ''Ash Wednesday'' to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in ''The Waste Land''. In a 1933 lecture he said: "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility. ... He would like to be something of a popular entertainer, and be able to think his own thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which to do it."

After ''The Waste Land'' (1922), he wrote that he was "now feeling toward a new form and style." One project he had in mind was writing a play in verse with a jazz tempo featuring Sweeney, a character who had appeared in a number of his poems. Eliot did not finish it. He did publish separately two pieces of what he had written. The two, ''Fragment of a Prologue'' (1926) and ''Fragment of an Agon'' (1927) were published together in 1932 as ''Sweeney Agonistes''. Although Eliot noted that this was not intended to be a one-act play, it is sometimes performed as one.

A pageant play by Eliot called ''The Rock'' was performed in 1934 for the benefit of churches in the Diocese of London. Much of it was a collaborative effort; Eliot accepted credit only for the authorship of one scene and the choruses. George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, had been instrumental in connecting Eliot with producer E. Martin Browne for the production of ''The Rock'', and later asked Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This one, ''Murder in the Cathedral'', concerning the death of the martyr, Thomas Becket, was more under Eliot's control. After this, he worked on commercial plays for more general audiences: ''The Family Reunion'' (1939), ''The Cocktail Party'' (1949), ''The Confidential Clerk'', (1953) and ''The Elder Statesman'' (1958). The Broadway production in New York of ''The Cocktail Party'' received the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play.

Literary criticism

Eliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism, strongly influencing the school of New Criticism. While somewhat self-deprecating and minimizing of his work—he once said his criticism was merely a “by-product” of his “private poetry-workshop”—Eliot is considered by some to be one of the greatest literary critics of the 20th century. The critic William Empson once said, "I do not know for certain how much of my own mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind."

In his critical essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art: “In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past.” This essay was a important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous works, a “simultaneous order” of works (i.e. "tradition"). Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poem ''The Waste Land''.

Also important to New Criticism was the idea—as articulated in Eliot’s essay "Hamlet and His Problems”—of an “objective correlative,” which posits a connection among the words of the text and events, states of mind, and experiences. This notion concedes that a poem means what it says, but suggests that there can be a non-subjective judgment based on different readers’ different—but perhaps corollary—interpretations of a work.

More generally, New Critics took a cue from Eliot in regard to his “‘classical’ ideals and his religious thought; his attention to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century; his deprecation of the Romantics, especially Shelley; his proposition that good poems constitute ‘not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence that ‘poets…at present must be difficult.’”

Eliot’s essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. Eliot particularly praised the metaphysical poets' ability to show experience as both psychological and sensual, while at the same time infusing this portrayal with—in Eliot's view—wit and uniqueness. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets," along with giving new significance and attention to metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of "unified sensibility," which is considered by some to mean the same thing as the term "metaphysical."

His 1922 poem ''The Waste Land'' also can be better understood in light of his work as a critic. He had argued that a poet must write “programmatic criticism"; that is, a poet should write to advance his own interests rather than to advance “historical scholarship". Viewed from Eliot's critical lens, ''The Waste Land'' likely shows his personal despair about World War I rather than an objective historical understanding of it.

In 1946 Eliot was a member of a group otherwise composed of senior clergy which produced a report entitled "Catholicity" published in 1947 as a contribution to the process which resulted in the Church of England's Report on Doctrine (1948).

In 1958, the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed Eliot to a commission that produced ''The Revised Psalter'' (1963). A harsh critic of Eliot, C. S. Lewis, was also a member of the commission, where their antagonism turned into a friendship.

Critical reception

Responses to his poetry

The initial critical response to Eliot's poetry, particularly "The Waste Land," was mixed. Some critics, like Edmund Wilson, Conrad Aiken, and Gilbert Seldes thought it was the best poetry being written in the English language while others thought it was esoteric and wilfully difficult. Edmund Wilson, being one of the critics who praised Eliot, called him "one of our only authentic poets." Nevertheless, it should be noted that Wilson also pointed out some of Eliot's weaknesses as a poet. In regard to "The Waste Land," Wilson admits its flaws ("its lack of structural unity"), but concluded, "I doubt whether there is a single other poem of equal length by a contemporary American which displays so high and so varied a mastery of English verse." And the writers of ''Time'' magazine were similarly baffled by a challenging poem like "The Waste Land". Of course, there were some critics, like John Crowe Ransom, who wrote mostly negative criticisms of Eliot's work but who also had some positive things to say. For instance, though Ransom negatively criticised "The Waste Land" for its "extreme disconnection," Ransom was not completely condemnatory of Eliot's work (like Powell) and admitted that Eliot was a talented poet.

Addressing some of the common criticisms directed against "The Waste Land" at the time, Gilbert Seldes stated, "It seems at first sight [to be a] remarkably disconnected [and] confused [poem]. . .[however] a closer view of the poem does more than illuminate the difficulties; it reveals the hidden form of the work, [and] indicates how each thing falls into place."

Allegations of anti-Semitism

The depiction of Jews in some of Eliot's poems has led several critics to accuse him of anti-Semitism. This case has been presented most forcefully in a study by Anthony Julius: ''T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form'' (1996). In "Gerontion", Eliot writes, in the voice of the poem's elderly narrator, "And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner [of my building],/ Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp." Another well-known example appears in the poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar." In this poem, Eliot wrote, "The rats are underneath the piles./ The Jew is underneath the lot./ Money in furs." Interpreting the line as an indirect comparison of Jews to rats, Julius writes, "The anti-Semitism is unmistakable. It reaches out like a clear signal to the reader." Julius's viewpoint has been supported by literary critics such as Christopher Ricks, George Steiner, and James Fenton.

In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933, published under the title ''After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy'' (1934), Eliot wrote of societal tradition and coherence: "What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." Eliot never re-published this book nor the lecture.

Craig Raine, in his books ''In Defence of T.S. Eliot'' (2001) and ''T. S. Eliot'' (2006), has sought to defend Eliot from the charge of anti-Semitism. Reviewing Raine's 2006 book, Paul Dean stated that he was not convinced by Raine's argument though he concluded, "Ultimately, as both Raine and, to do him justice, Julius insist, however much Eliot may have been compromised as a person, as we all are in our several ways, his greatness as a poet remains."

Awards

Order of Merit (awarded by King George VI (United Kingdom), 1948)

Nobel Prize for Literature "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry" (Stockholm, 1948)

Officier de la Legion d'Honneur (1951)

Hanseatic Goethe Prize (Hamburg, 1955)

Dante Medal (Florence, 1959)

Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, (1960)

Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964)

13 honorary doctorates (including Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and Harvard)

Tony Award in 1950 for Best Play: The Broadway production of ''The Cocktail Party''.

Two posthumous Tony Awards (1983) for his poems used in the musical ''Cats''

Eliot College of the University of Kent, England, named after him

Celebrated on commemorative postage stamps

A star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame

Works

Poetry

''Prufrock and Other Observations'' (1917)

* ''The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock''

* ''Portrait of a Lady (poem)''

* ''Aunt Helen''

''Poems'' (1920)

* ''Gerontion''

* ''Sweeney Among the Nightingales''

* "The Hippopotamus"

*"Whispers of Immortality"

*"Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service"

*"A Cooking Egg"

''The Waste Land'' (1922)

''The Hollow Men'' (1925)

''Ariel Poems'' (1927–1954)

* ''The Journey of the Magi'' (1927)

''Ash Wednesday'' (1930)

''Coriolan'' (1931)

''Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'' (1939)

''The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs'' and ''Billy M'Caw: The Remarkable Parrot'' (1939) in ''The Queen's Book of the Red Cross''

''Four Quartets'' (1945)

Plays

''Sweeney Agonistes'' (published in 1926, first performed in 1934)

''The Rock'' (1934)

''Murder in the Cathedral'' (1935)

''The Family Reunion'' (1939)

''The Cocktail Party'' (1949)

''The Confidential Clerk'' (1953)

''The Elder Statesman'' (first performed in 1958, published in 1959)

Nonfiction

''Christianity & Culture'' (1939, 1948)

''The Second-Order Mind'' (1920)

''Tradition and the Individual Talent'' (1920)

''The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism'' (1920)

* "Hamlet and His Problems"

''Homage to John Dryden'' (1924)

''Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca'' (1928)

''For Lancelot Andrewes'' (1928)

''Dante'' (1929)

''Selected Essays, 1917–1932'' (1932)

''The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism'' (1933)

''After Strange Gods'' (1934)

''Elizabethan Essays'' (1934)

''Essays Ancient and Modern'' (1936)

''The Idea of a Christian Society'' (1939)

''A Choice of Kipling's Verse'' (1941) made by Eliot, with an essay on Rudyard Kipling, London, Faber and Faber.

''Notes Towards the Definition of Culture'' (1948)

''Poetry and Drama'' (1951)

''The Three Voices of Poetry'' (1954)

''The Frontiers of Criticism'' (1956)

''On Poetry and Poets'' (1957)

Posthumous publications

''To Criticize the Critic'' (1965)

''The Waste Land: Facsimile Edition'' (1974)

''Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917'' (1996)

Critical editions

''Collected Poems, 1909-1962'' (1963) online edition; also excerpt and text search

''Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, Illustrated Edition'' (1982) excerpt and text search

'' Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot'' ed. by Frank Kermode (1975) excerpt and text search

'' The Waste Land'' (Norton Critical Editions) ed. by Michael North (2000) excerpt and text search

'' Selected essays'' (1932); enlarged (1960)

''The letters of T. S. Eliot,'' ed. Valerie Eliot, vol. 1: 1898-1922 (1988)

''The letters of T. S. Eliot,'' ed. Valerie Eliot, vol. 2: 1923-1925 (2009)

Notes

Further reading

Alldritt, Keith. ''Eliot's Four Quartets: Poetry as Chamber Music. Woburn Press, 1978.

Ali, Ahmed. ''Mr. Eliot's Penny World of Dreams: An Essay in the Interpretation of T.S. Eliot's Poetry'', Published for the Lucknow University by New Book Co., Bombay, P.S. King & Staples Ltd., Westminster, London, 1942, pages 138.

Lal, P. (Editor), ''T. S. Eliot: Homage from India: A Commemoration Volume of 55 Essays & Elegies'', Writer's Workshop Calcutta, 1965.

Forster, E. M. Essay on T. S. Eliot, in ''Life and Letters'', June 1929.

Harding, W. D. ''T. S. Eliot, 1925-1935'', Scrutiny, September 1936: A Review.

Brown, Alec. ''The Lyrical Impulse in Eliot's Poetry'', Scrutinies vol. 2.

Ackroyd, Peter. ''T. S. Eliot: A Life''. (1984)

Asher, Kenneth ''T. S. Eliot and Ideology'' (1995)

Brand, Clinton A. "The Voice of This Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T. S. Eliot," ''Modern Age'' Volume 45, Number 4; Fall 2003 online edition, conservative perspective

Bush, Ronald. ''T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style''. (1984)

Christensen, Karen. "Dear Mrs. Eliot," ''The Guardian Review.'' (29 January 2005).

Crawford, Robert. ''The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot''. (1987).

Dawson, J.L., P.D. Holland & D.J. McKitterick, ''A Concordance to 'The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot'.'' Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Gardner, Helen. ''The Composition of Four Quartets''. (1978).

---''The Art of T. S. Eliot''. (1949)

Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. ''Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. University Press of Mississippi (1978).

---. ''T. S. Eliot's Parisian Year''. University Press of Florida (2009).

''The Letters of T. S. Eliot''. Ed. by Valerie Eliot. Vol. I, 1898-1922. San Diego [etc.] 1988. Vol. 2, 1923-1925. Edited by Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, London, Faber, 2009. ISBN 9780571140817

Gordon, Lyndall. ''T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life''. (1998)

Julius, Anthony. ''T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form''. Cambridge University Press (1995)

Kelleter, Frank. ''Die Moderne und der Tod: Edgar Allan Poe–T. S. Eliot–Samuel Beckett.'' Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1998.

Kenner, Hugh. ''The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot''. (1969)

---, editor, ''T. S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays'', Prentice-Hall. (1962)

Kirsch, Adam. "Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot", ''The American Scholar''. Vol 67, Iss 3. Summer 1998

Kirk, Russell ''Eliot and His Age: T. S, Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century''. (Introduction by Benjamin G. Lockerd Jr.). Wilmington: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Republication of the revised second edition, 2008.

Levy, William Turner and Victor Scherle. ''Affectionately, T. S. Eliot: The Story of a Friendship: 1947-1965''. (1968).

Maxwell, D. E. S. ''The Poetry of T. S. Eliot'', Routledge and Keagan Paul. (1960).

Matthews, T. S. ''Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T. S. Eliot''. (1973)

Miller, James E., Jr. ''T. S. Eliot. The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922''. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005.

Narita, Tatsushi, "The Young T. S. Eliot and Alien Cultures: His Philippine Interactions", ''The Review of English Studies''. Vol 45. (1994)

North, Michael (ed.) ''The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions)''. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

Quillian, William H. ''Hamlet and the New Poetic: James Joyce and T. S. Eliot.'' Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press (1983).

Raine, Craig. ''T. S. Eliot''. Oxford University Press (2006).

Ricks, Christopher.''T. S. Eliot and Prejudice''. (1988).

Robinson, Ian "The English Prophets", The Brynmill Press Ltd (2001)

Ronnick, Michele Valerie, "Eliot's 'The Hollow Men'", ''The Explicator''. Vol 56, Iss 2. (1998)

Schuchard, Ronald. ''Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art''. (1999).

Scofield, Dr. Martin, "T.S. Eliot: The Poems", Cambridge University Press. (1988).

Seferis, George. "Introduction to T. S. Eliot" in ''Modernism/modernity'' 16:1 ( January 2009), 146-60.

Seymour-Jones, Carole. ''Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot''. (2001).

Sencourt, Robert. ''T. S. Eliot: A Memoir''. (1971)

Spender, Stephen. ''T. S. Eliot''. (1975)

Sinha, Arun Kumar and Vikram, Kumar. ''T. S. Eliot: An Intensive Study of Selected Poems'', Spectrum Books Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi, (2005).

Spurr, Barry, ''Anglo-Catholic in Religion: T. S. Eliot and Christianity'', The Lutterworth Press (2009)

Weidmann, Dirk. ''And I Tiresias have foresuffered all: More Than Allusions to Ovid in T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land?''. In: ''LITERATURA'' 51 (3), 2009, pp.98-108.

Tate, Allen, editor. ''T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work'', First published in 1966 - republished by Penguin 1971.

Poems by T.S. Eliot and biography at PoetryFoundation.org

Text of early poems (1907-1910) printed in the ''Harvard Advocate''

Yale College Lecture on T.S. Eliot audio, video and full transcripts from Open Yale Courses

Eliot's grave

T. S. Eliot's biographic sketch at Find A Grave

What the Thunder Said: T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber

T. S. Eliot Collection at Bartleby.com

T. S. Eliot Society Home Page

T. S. Eliot Hypertext Project

Bevis Hillier on Eliot and Cawein (pdf)

Eliot family genealogy, including T. S. Eliot

Recordings of Eliot reading from "Prufrock" and ''The Waste Land''

Biography From T. S. Eliot Lives' and Legacies

T. S. Eliot Collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

T.S. Eliot collection at University of Victoria, Special Collections

External links

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af:T. S. Eliot als:Thomas Stearns Eliot am:ቲ.ኤስ. ኤልየት ar:ت. س. إليوت an:T. S. Eliot az:Tomas Eliot bn:টি এস এলিয়ট zh-min-nan:T. S. Eliot be:Томас Стэрнз Эліят be-x-old:Томас Стэрнз Эліёт bs:Thomas Stearns Eliot bg:Томас Стърнз Елиът ca:T. S. Eliot cs:Thomas Stearns Eliot cy:T. S. Eliot da:T.S. Eliot de:T. S. Eliot et:T. S. Eliot el:Τόμας Στερνς Έλιοτ es:T. S. Eliot eo:T. S. Eliot fa:تی. اس. الیوت fr:T. S. Eliot ga:T. S. Eliot gd:Thomas Stearns Eliot gl:Thomas Stearns Eliot ko:T. S. 엘리엇 hy:Թոմաս Սթեռնս Էլիոթ hi:टी एस एलियट hr:Thomas Stearns Eliot io:T. S. Eliot ilo:T. S. Eliot id:Thomas Stearns Eliot is:T. S. Eliot it:Thomas Stearns Eliot he:טי אס אליוט ka:ტომას სტერნზ ელიოტი sw:T. S. Eliot ku:Thomas Stearns Eliot la:Thomas Stearns Eliot lv:Tomass Stērnss Eliots lt:Thomas Stearns Eliot hu:T. S. Eliot mk:Т. С. Елиот ml:ടി.എസ്. എലിയറ്റ് mr:टी.एस. इलियट nl:T.S. Eliot ja:T・S・エリオット no:T.S. Eliot nn:T.S. Eliot oc:T. S. Eliot pnb:ٹی ایس ایلیٹ pl:Thomas Stearns Eliot pt:T. S. Eliot ro:T.S. Eliot ru:Элиот, Томас Стернз sa:टी. एस. एलियट simple:T. S. Eliot sk:Thomas Stearns Eliot sl:Thomas Stearns Eliot sr:Томас Стернс Елиот fi:T. S. Eliot sv:T.S. Eliot tl:T. S. Eliot tg:Т.С. Элиот tr:T. S. Eliot uk:Томас Стернз Еліот ur:ٹی۔ ایس ایلیٹ vi:T. S. Eliot war:T.S. Eliot yo:T. S. Eliot zh:T·S·艾略特

bgcolour	#EEDD82
name	Leonardo da Vinci
birth name	Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci
birth date	April 15, 1452
birth place	Vinci, Italy, near Florence
death date	May 02, 1519
death place	Amboise, France
nationality	Italian
field	Many and diverse fields of arts and sciences
movement	High Renaissance
works	''Mona Lisa'', ''The Last Supper'', ''The Vitruvian Man''
signature	Da Vinci Signature.svg }}

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci () (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about Leonardo, his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.

Born out of wedlock to a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.

Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Among his works, the ''Mona Lisa'' is the most famous and most parodied portrait and ''The Last Supper'' the most reproduced religious painting of all time, with their fame approached only by Michelangelo's ''Creation of Adam''. Leonardo's drawing of the ''Vitruvian Man'' is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on items as varied as the euro, textbooks, and T-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, compose a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. He made important discoveries in anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics, but he did not publish his findings and they had no direct influence on later science.

Life

Childhood, 1452–1466

Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, "at the third hour of the night" in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of the Medici-ruled Republic of Florence. He was the out-of-wedlock son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina, a peasant. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, “da Vinci” simply meaning “of Vinci”: his full birth name was "Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci". The inclusion of the title "ser" indicated that Leonardo's father was a gentleman.

Little is known about Leonardo's early life. He spent his first five years in the hamlet of Anchiano in the home of his mother, then from 1457 lived in the household of his father, grandparents and uncle, Francesco, in the small town of Vinci. His father had married a sixteen-year-old girl named Albiera, who loved Leonardo but died young. When Leonardo was sixteen his father married again, to twenty-year-old Francesca Lanfredini. It was not until his third and fourth marriages that Ser Piero produced legitimate heirs.

Leonardo received an informal education in Latin, geometry and mathematics. In later life, Leonardo only recorded two childhood incidents. One, which he regarded as an omen, was when a kite dropped from the sky and hovered over his cradle, its tail feathers brushing his face. The second occurred while exploring in the mountains. He discovered a cave and was both terrified that some great monster might lurk there, and driven by curiosity to find out what was inside.

Leonardo's early life has been the subject of historical conjecture. Vasari, the 16th-century biographer of Renaissance painters tells of how a local peasant made himself a round shield and requested that Ser Piero have it painted for him. Leonardo responded with a painting of a monster spitting fire which was so terrifying that Ser Piero sold it to a Florentine art dealer, who sold it to the Duke of Milan. Meanwhile, having made a profit, Ser Piero bought a shield decorated with a heart pierced by an arrow, which he gave to the peasant.

Verrocchio's workshop, 1466–1476

In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio, whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling.

Much of the painted production of Verrocchio's workshop was done by his employees. According to Vasari, Leonardo collaborated with Verrocchio on his ''Baptism of Christ'', painting the young angel holding Jesus' robe in a manner that was so far superior to his master's that Verrocchio put down his brush and never painted again. On close examination, the painting reveals much that has been painted or touched up over the tempera using the new technique of oil paint, with the landscape, the rocks that can be seen through the brown mountain stream and much of the figure of Jesus bearing witness to the hand of Leonardo. Leonardo himself may have been the model for two existent works by Verrocchio: the bronze statue of ''David'' in the Bargello, and the Archangel Raphael in ''Tobias and the Angel''.

By 1472, at the age of twenty, Leonardo qualified as a master in the Guild of St Luke, the guild of artists and doctors of medicine, but even after his father set him up in his own workshop, his attachment to Verrocchio was such that he continued to collaborate with him. Leonardo's earliest known dated work is a drawing in pen and ink of the Arno valley, drawn on August 5, 1473.

Professional life, 1476–1513

Florentine court records of 1476 show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy, and acquitted. From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts. In 1478 he left Verroccio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the Garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence, a Neo-Platonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers that the Medici had established. In January 1478 he received his first independent commission, to paint an altarpiece in 1478 for the Chapel of St Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio and ''The Adoration of the Magi'' in March 1481 for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither important commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.

In 1482 Leonardo, who according to Vasari was a most talented musician, created a silver lyre in the shape of a horse's head. Lorenzo de' Medici sent Leonardo, bearing the lyre as a gift, to Milan, to secure peace with Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan. At this time Leonardo wrote an often-quoted letter to Ludovico, describing the many marvellous and diverse things that he could achieve in the field of engineering and informing the Lord that he could also paint.

Leonardo worked in Milan from 1482 until 1499. He was commissioned to paint the ''Virgin of the Rocks'' for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, and ''The Last Supper'' for the monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie. Between 1493 and 1495 Leonardo listed a woman called Caterina among his dependents in his taxation documents. When she died in 1495, the list of funeral expenditures suggests that she was his mother.

Leonardo was employed on many different projects for Ludovico, including the preparation of floats and pageants for special occasions, designs for a dome for Milan Cathedral and a model for a huge equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza, Ludovico's predecessor. Seventy tons of bronze were set aside for casting it. The monument remained unfinished for several years, which was not unusual for Leonardo. In 1492 the clay model of the horse was completed. It surpassed in size the only two large equestrian statues of the Renaissance, Donatello's statue of Gattemelata in Padua and Verrocchio's Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, and became known as the "Gran Cavallo". Leonardo began making detailed plans for its casting, however, Michelangelo rudely implied that Leonardo was unable to cast it. In November 1494 Ludovico gave the bronze to be used for cannons to defend the city from invasion by Charles VIII.

At the start of the Second Italian War in 1499, the invading French troops used the life-size clay model for the "Gran Cavallo" for target practice. With Ludovico Sforza overthrown, Leonardo, with his assistant Salai and friend, the mathematician Luca Pacioli, fled Milan for Venice, where he was employed as a military architect and engineer, devising methods to defend the city from naval attack. On his return to Florence in 1500, he and his household were guests of the Servite monks at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata and were provided with a workshop where, according to Vasari, Leonardo created the cartoon of ''The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist'', a work that won such admiration that "men and women, young and old" flocked to see it "as if they were attending a great festival".|group="nb"}}

In Cesena, in 1502 Leonardo entered the service of Cesare Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI, acting as a military architect and engineer and travelling throughout Italy with his patron. Leonardo created a map of Cesare Borgia's stronghold, a town plan of Imola in order to win his patronage. Maps were extremely rare at the time and it would have seemed like a new concept; upon seeing it, Cesare hired Leonardo as his chief military engineer and architect. Later in the year, Leonardo produced another map for his patron, one of Chiana Valley, Tuscany so as to give his patron a better overlay of the land and greater strategic position. He created this map in conjunction with his other project of constructing a dam from the sea to Florence in order to allow a supply of water to sustain the canal during all seasons.

Leonardo returned to Florence where he rejoined the Guild of St Luke on October 18, 1503, and spent two years designing and painting a great mural of ''The Battle of Anghiari'' for the Signoria, with Michelangelo designing its companion piece, ''The Battle of Cascina''. Leonardo's painting is only known from preparatory sketches and several copies of the centre section, of which the best known, and probably least accurate is by Peter Paul Rubens.|group="nb"}} In Florence in 1504, he was part of a committee formed to relocate, against the artist's will, Michelangelo's statue of David.

In 1506 Leonardo returned to Milan. Many of his most prominent pupils or followers in painting either knew or worked with him in Milan, including Bernardino Luini, Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio and Marco D'Oggione. However, he did not stay in Milan for long because his father had died in 1504, and in 1507 he was back in Florence trying to sort out problems with his brothers over his father's estate. By 1508 Leonardo was back in Milan, living in his own house in Porta Orientale in the parish of Santa Babila.

Old age, 1513–1519

From September 1513 to 1516, Leonardo spent much of his time living in the Belvedere in the Vatican in Rome, where Raphael and Michelangelo were both active at the time. In October 1515, Francis I of France recaptured Milan. On December 19, Leonardo was present at the meeting of Francis I and Pope Leo X, which took place in Bologna. Leonardo was commissioned to make for Francis a mechanical lion which could walk forward, then open its chest to reveal a cluster of lilies.|group="nb"}} In 1516, he entered François' service, being given the use of the manor house Clos Lucé near the king's residence at the royal Château d'Amboise. It was here that he spent the last three years of his life, accompanied by his friend and apprentice, Count Francesco Melzi, and supported by a pension totalling 10,000 scudi.

Leonardo died at Clos Lucé, on May 2, 1519. Francis I had become a close friend. Vasari records that the King held Leonardo's head in his arms as he died, although this story, beloved by the French and portrayed in romantic paintings by Ingres, Ménageot and other French artists, as well as by Angelica Kauffmann, may be legend rather than fact. Vasari also tells us that in his last days, Leonardo sent for a priest to make his confession and to receive the Holy Sacrament. In accordance to his will, sixty beggars followed his casket. He was buried in the Chapel of Saint-Hubert in Château d'Amboise. Melzi was the principal heir and executor, receiving as well as money, Leonardo's paintings, tools, library and personal effects. Leonardo also remembered his other long-time pupil and companion, Salai and his servant Battista di Vilussis, who each received half of Leonardo's vineyards, his brothers who received land, and his serving woman who received a black cloak "of good stuff" with a fur edge.

Some twenty years after Leonardo's death, Francis was reported by the goldsmith and sculptor Benevenuto Cellini as saying: "There had never been another man born in the world who knew as much as Leonardo, not so much about painting, sculpture and architecture, as that he was a very great philosopher."

Relationships and influences

Florence — Leonardo's artistic and social background

Florence, at the time of Leonardo's youth, was the centre of Christian Humanist thought and culture. Leonardo commenced his apprenticeship with Verrocchio in 1466, the year that Verrocchio's master, the great sculptor Donatello, died. The painter Uccello whose early experiments with perspective were to influence the development of landscape painting, was a very old man. The painters Piero della Francesca and Fra Filippo Lippi, sculptor Luca della Robbia, and architect and writer Leon Battista Alberti were in their sixties. The successful artists of the next generation were Leonardo's teacher Verrocchio, Antonio Pollaiuolo and the portrait sculptor, Mino da Fiesole whose lifelike busts give the most reliable likenesses of Lorenzo Medici's father Piero and uncle Giovanni.

Leonardo's youth was spent in a Florence that was ornamented by the works of these artists and by Donatello's contemporaries, Masaccio whose figurative frescoes were imbued with realism and emotion and Ghiberti whose ''Gates of Paradise'', gleaming with gold leaf, displayed the art of combining complex figure compositions with detailed architectural backgrounds. Piero della Francesca had made a detailed study of perspective, and was the first painter to make a scientific study of light. These studies and Alberti's Treatise were to have a profound effect on younger artists and in particular on Leonardo's own observations and artworks.

Massaccio's depiction of the naked and distraught Adam and Eve leaving the Garden of Eden created a powerfully expressive image of the human form, cast into three dimensions by the use of light and shade which was to be developed in the works of Leonardo in a way that was to be influential in the course of painting. The Humanist influence of Donatello's David can be seen in Leonardo's late paintings, particularly ''John the Baptist''.

A prevalent tradition in Florence was the small altarpiece of the Virgin and Child. Many of these were created in tempera or glazed terracotta by the workshops of Filippo Lippi, Verrocchio and the prolific della Robbia family. Leonardo's early Madonnas such as ''The Madonna with a carnation'' and ''The Benois Madonna'' followed this tradition while showing idiosyncratic departures, particularly in the case of the Benois Madonna in which the Virgin is set at an oblique angle to the picture space with the Christ Child at the opposite angle. This compositional theme was to emerge in Leonardo's later paintings such as ''The Virgin and Child with St. Anne''.

Leonardo was a contemporary of Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio and Perugino, who were all slightly older than he was. He would have met them at the workshop of Verrocchio, with whom they had associations, and at the Academy of the Medici. Botticelli was a particular favourite of the Medici family and thus his success as a painter was assured. Ghirlandaio and Perugino were both prolific and ran large workshops. They competently delivered commissions to well-satisfied patrons who appreciated Ghirlandaio's ability to portray the wealthy citizens of Florence within large religious frescoes, and Perugino's ability to deliver a multitude of saints and angels of unfailing sweetness and innocence. thumb|left|''The Portinari Altarpiece'', by Hugo van der Goes for a Florentine family These three were among those commissioned to paint the walls of the Sistine Chapel, the work commencing with Perugino's employment in 1479. Leonardo was not part of this prestigious commission. His first significant commission, The ''Adoration of the Magi'' for the Monks of Scopeto, was never completed.

In 1476, during the time of Leonardo's association with Verrocchio's workshop, the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes arrived in Florence, bringing new painterly techniques from Northern Europe which were to profoundly effect Leonardo, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and others. In 1479, the Sicilian painter Antonello da Messina, who worked exclusively in oils, traveled north on his way to Venice, where the leading painter, Giovanni Bellini adopted the technique of oil painting, quickly making it the preferred method in Venice. Leonardo was also later to visit Venice.

Like the two contemporary architects, Bramante and Antonio da Sangallo the Elder, Leonardo experimented with designs for centrally planned churches, a number of which appear in his journals, as both plans and views, although none was ever realised.

thumb|upright|Lorenzo de' Medici between Antonio Pucci and Francesco Sassetti, with Giulio de' Medici, fresco by Ghirlandaio Leonardo's political contemporaries were Lorenzo Medici (il Magnifico), who was three years older, and his popular younger brother Giuliano who was slain in the Pazzi Conspiracy in 1478. Ludovico il Moro who ruled Milan between 1479–1499 and to whom Leonardo was sent as ambassador from the Medici court, was also of Leonardo's age.

With Alberti, Leonardo visited the home of the Medici and through them came to know the older Humanist philosophers of whom Marsiglio Ficino, proponent of Neo Platonism, Cristoforo Landino, writer of commentaries on Classical writings, and John Argyropoulos, teacher of Greek and translator of Aristotle were foremost. Also associated with the Academy of the Medici was Leonardo's contemporary, the brilliant young poet and philosopher Pico della Mirandola. Leonardo later wrote in the margin of a journal "The Medici made me and the Medici destroyed me." While it was through the action of Lorenzo that Leonardo was to receive his important Milanese commissions, it is not known exactly what Leonardo meant by this cryptic comment.

Although usually named together as the three giants of the High Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Raphael were not of the same generation. Leonardo was twenty-three when Michelangelo was born and thirty-one when Raphael was born. Raphael only lived until the age of 37 and died in 1520, the year after Leonardo, but Michelangelo went on creating for another 45 years.

Personal life

Within Leonardo's lifetime, his extraordinary powers of invention, his "outstanding physical beauty", "infinite grace", "great strength and generosity", "regal spirit and tremendous breadth of mind" as described by Vasari, as well as all other aspects of his life, attracted the curiosity of others. One such aspect is his respect for life evidenced by his vegetarianism and his habit, described by Vasari, of purchasing caged birds and releasing them.

Leonardo had many friends who are now renowned either in their fields or for their historical significance. They included the mathematician Luca Pacioli, with whom he collaborated on a book in the 1490s, as well as Franchinus Gaffurius and Isabella d'Este. Leonardo appears to have had no close relationships with women except for his friendship with the two Este sisters, Beatrice and Isabella. He drew a portrait of her while on a journey which took him through Mantua, and which appears to have been used to create a painted portrait now lost.

Beyond friendship, Leonardo kept his private life secret. His sexuality has been the subject of satire, analysis, and speculation. This trend began in the mid-16th century and was revived in the 19th and 20th centuries, most notably by Sigmund Freud. Leonardo's most intimate relationships were perhaps with his pupils Salai and Melzi. Melzi, writing to inform Leonardo's brothers of his death, described Leonardo's feelings for his pupils as both loving and passionate.

It has been claimed since the 16th century that these relationships were of a sexual or erotic nature. Court records of 1476, when he was aged twenty-four, show that Leonardo and three other young men were charged with sodomy in an incident involving a well-known male prostitute. The charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, and there is speculation that since one of the accused, Lionardo de Tornabuoni, was related to Lorenzo de' Medici, the family exerted its influence to secure the dismissal. Since that date much has been written about his presumed homosexuality and its role in his art, particularly in the androgyny and eroticism manifested in ''John the Baptist'' and ''Bacchus'' and more explicitly in a number of erotic drawings.

Assistants and pupils

Gian Giacomo Caprotti da Oreno, nicknamed ''Salai'' or ''Il Salaino'' ("The Little Unclean One" i.e., the devil), entered Leonardo's household in 1490. After only a year, Leonardo made a list of his misdemeanours, calling him "a thief, a liar, stubborn, and a glutton", after he had made off with money and valuables on at least five occasions, and spent a fortune on clothes. Nevertheless, Leonardo treated him with great indulgence and he remained in Leonardo's household for the next thirty years. Salai executed a number of paintings under the name of Andrea Salai, but although Vasari claims that Leonardo "taught him a great deal about painting", Salai owned the ''Mona Lisa'' at the time of his death in 1525, and in his will it was assessed at 505 lire, an exceptionally high valuation for a small panel portrait.

In 1506, Leonardo took on another pupil, Count Francesco Melzi, the son of a Lombard aristocrat, who is considered to have been his favourite student. He travelled to France with Leonardo, and remained with him until the latter's death. Upon Leonardo's death, Melzi inherited the artistic and scientific works, manuscripts, and collections of Leonardo, and faithfully administered the estate.

Painting

Despite the recent awareness and admiration of Leonardo as a scientist and inventor, for the better part of four hundred years his enormous fame rested on his achievements as a painter and on a handful of works, either authenticated or attributed to him that have been regarded as among the supreme masterpieces.

These paintings are famous for a variety of qualities which have been much imitated by students and discussed at great length by connoisseurs and critics. Among the qualities that make Leonardo's work unique are the innovative techniques that he used in laying on the paint, his detailed knowledge of anatomy, light, botany and geology, his interest in physiognomy and the way in which humans register emotion in expression and gesture, his innovative use of the human form in figurative composition and his use of the subtle gradation of tone. All these qualities come together in his most famous painted works, the ''Mona Lisa'', the ''Last Supper'' and the ''Virgin of the Rocks''.

Early works

Leonardo's early works begin with the ''Baptism of Christ'' painted in conjunction with Verrocchio. Two other paintings appear to date from his time at the workshop, both of which are Annunciations. One is small, }} long and }} high. It is a "predella" to go at the base of a larger composition, in this case a painting by Lorenzo di Credi from which it has become separated. The other is a much larger work, }} long. In both these Annunciations, Leonardo has used a formal arrangement, such as in Fra Angelico's two well known pictures of the same subject, of the Virgin Mary sitting or kneeling to the right of the picture, approached from the left by an angel in profile, with rich flowing garment, raised wings and bearing a lily. Although previously attributed to Ghirlandaio, the larger work is now almost universally attributed to Leonardo.

In the smaller picture Mary averts her eyes and folds her hands in a gesture that symbolised submission to God's will. In the larger picture, however, Mary is not in the least submissive. The beautiful girl, interrupted in her reading by this unexpected messenger, puts a finger in her bible to mark the place and raises her hand in a formal gesture of greeting or surprise. This calm young woman appears to accept her role as the Mother of God not with resignation but with confidence. In this painting the young Leonardo presents the Humanist face of the Virgin Mary, recognising humanity's role in God's incarnation.|group="nb"}}

Paintings of the 1480s

In the 1480s Leonardo received two very important commissions, and commenced another work which was also of ground-breaking importance in terms of composition. Unfortunately, two of the three were never finished, and the third took so long that it was subject to lengthy negotiations over completion and payment. One of these paintings is that of ''St. Jerome in the Wilderness''. Bortolon associates this picture with a difficult period of Leonardo's life, and the signs of melancholy in his diary: "I thought I was learning to live; I was only learning to die."

Although the painting is barely begun the composition can be seen and it is very unusual. Jerome, as a penitent, occupies the middle of the picture, set on a slight diagonal and viewed somewhat from above. His kneeling form takes on a trapezoid shape, with one arm stretched to the outer edge of the painting and his gaze looking in the opposite direction. J. Wasserman points out the link between this painting and Leonardo's anatomical studies. Across the foreground sprawls his symbol, a great lion whose body and tail make a double spiral across the base of the picture space. The other remarkable feature is the sketchy landscape of craggy rocks against which the figure is silhouetted.

The daring display of figure composition, the landscape elements and personal drama also appear in the great unfinished masterpiece, the ''Adoration of the Magi'', a commission from the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. It is a very complex composition, of about 250 x 250 centimetres. Leonardo did numerous drawings and preparatory studies, including a detailed one in linear perspective of the ruined classical architecture which makes part of the backdrop to the scene. But in 1482 Leonardo went off to Milan at the behest of Lorenzo de' Medici in order to win favour with Ludovico il Moro and the painting was abandoned.

The third important work of this period is the ''Virgin of the Rocks'' which was commissioned in Milan for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception. The painting, to be done with the assistance of the de Predis brothers, was to fill a large complex altarpiece, already constructed. Leonardo chose to paint an apocryphal moment of the infancy of Christ when the Infant John the Baptist, in protection of an angel, met the Holy Family on the road to Egypt. In this scene, as painted by Leonardo, John recognizes and worships Jesus as the Christ. The painting demonstrates an eerie beauty as the graceful figures kneel in adoration around the infant Christ in a wild landscape of tumbling rock and whirling water. While the painting is quite large, about , it is not nearly as complex as the painting ordered by the monks of St Donato, having only four figures rather than about fifty and a rocky landscape rather than architectural details. The painting was eventually finished; in fact, two versions of the painting were finished, one which remained at the chapel of the Confraternity and the other which Leonardo carried away to France. But the Brothers did not get their painting, or the de Predis their payment, until the next century.

Paintings of the 1490s

Leonardo's most famous painting of the 1490s is ''The Last Supper'', also painted in Milan. The painting represents the last meal shared by Jesus with his disciples before his capture and death. It shows specifically the moment when Jesus has said "one of you will betray me". Leonardo tells the story of the consternation that this statement caused to the twelve followers of Jesus.

The novelist Matteo Bandello observed Leonardo at work and wrote that some days he would paint from dawn till dusk without stopping to eat, and then not paint for three or four days at a time. This, according to Vasari, was beyond the comprehension of the prior, who hounded him until Leonardo asked Ludovico to intervene. Vasari describes how Leonardo, troubled over his ability to adequately depict the faces of Christ and the traitor Judas, told the Duke that he might be obliged to use the prior as his model.

When finished, the painting was acclaimed as a masterpiece of design and characterisation, but it deteriorated rapidly, so that within a hundred years it was described by one viewer as "completely ruined". Leonardo, instead of using the reliable technique of fresco, had used tempera over a ground that was mainly gesso, resulting in a surface which was subject to mold and to flaking. Despite this, the painting has remained one of the most reproduced works of art, countless copies being made in every medium from carpets to cameos.

Paintings of the 1500s

Among the works created by Leonardo in the 16th century is the small portrait known as the ''Mona Lisa'' or "la Gioconda", the laughing one. In the present era it is arguably the most famous painting in the world. Its fame rests, in particular, on the elusive smile on the woman's face, its mysterious quality brought about perhaps by the fact that the artist has subtly shadowed the corners of the mouth and eyes so that the exact nature of the smile cannot be determined. The shadowy quality for which the work is renowned came to be called "sfumato" or Leonardo's smoke. Vasari, who is generally thought to have known the painting only by repute, said that "the smile was so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human; and those who saw it were amazed to find that it was as alive as the original".|group="nb"}}

Other characteristics found in this work are the unadorned dress, in which the eyes and hands have no competition from other details, the dramatic landscape background in which the world seems to be in a state of flux, the subdued colouring and the extremely smooth nature of the painterly technique, employing oils, but laid on much like tempera and blended on the surface so that the brushstrokes are indistinguishable. Vasari expressed the opinion that the manner of painting would make even "the most confident master ... despair and lose heart." The perfect state of preservation and the fact that there is no sign of repair or overpainting is extremely rare in a panel painting of this date.

In the ''Virgin and Child with St. Anne'' (see below ) the composition again picks up the theme of figures in a landscape which Wasserman describes as "breathtakingly beautiful" and harks back to the St Jerome picture with the figure set at an oblique angle. What makes this painting unusual is that there are two obliquely set figures superimposed. Mary is seated on the knee of her mother, St Anne. She leans forward to restrain the Christ Child as he plays roughly with a lamb, the sign of his own impending sacrifice. This painting, which was copied many times, was to influence Michelangelo, Raphael, and Andrea del Sarto, and through them Pontormo and Correggio. The trends in composition were adopted in particular by the Venetian painters Tintoretto and Veronese.

Drawings

Leonardo was not a prolific painter, but he was a most prolific draftsman, keeping journals full of small sketches and detailed drawings recording all manner of things that took his attention. As well as the journals there exist many studies for paintings, some of which can be identified as preparatory to particular works such as ''The Adoration of the Magi'', ''The Virgin of the Rocks'' and ''The Last Supper''. His earliest dated drawing is a ''Landscape of the Arno Valley'', 1473, which shows the river, the mountains, Montelupo Castle and the farmlands beyond it in great detail.

Among his famous drawings are the ''Vitruvian Man'', a study of the proportions of the human body, the ''Head of an Angel'', for ''The Virgin of the Rocks'' in the Louvre, a botanical study of ''Star of Bethlehem'' and a large drawing (160×100 cm) in black chalk on coloured paper of ''The Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist'' in the National Gallery, London. This drawing employs the subtle ''sfumato'' technique of shading, in the manner of the ''Mona Lisa''. It is thought that Leonardo never made a painting from it, the closest similarity being to ''The Virgin and Child with St. Anne'' in the Louvre.

Other drawings of interest include numerous studies generally referred to as "caricatures" because, although exaggerated, they appear to be based upon observation of live models. Vasari relates that if Leonardo saw a person with an interesting face he would follow them around all day observing them. There are numerous studies of beautiful young men, often associated with Salai, with the rare and much admired facial feature, the so-called "Grecian profile". These faces are often contrasted with that of a warrior. Salai is often depicted in fancy-dress costume. Leonardo is known to have designed sets for pageants with which these may be associated. Other, often meticulous, drawings show studies of drapery. A marked development in Leonardo's ability to draw drapery occurred in his early works. Another often-reproduced drawing is a macabre sketch that was done by Leonardo in Florence in 1479 showing the body of Bernardo Baroncelli, hanged in connection with the murder of Giuliano, brother of Lorenzo de'Medici, in the Pazzi Conspiracy. With dispassionate integrity Leonardo has registered in neat mirror writing the colours of the robes that Baroncelli was wearing when he died.

Leonardo as observer, scientist and inventor

Journals and notes

Renaissance humanism saw no mutually exclusive polarities between the sciences and the arts, and Leonardo's studies in science and engineering are as impressive and innovative as his artistic work. These studies were recorded in 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which fuse art and natural philosophy (the forerunner of modern science), made and maintained daily throughout Leonardo's life and travels, as he made continual observations of the world around him.

Leonardo's writings are mostly in mirror-image cursive. The reason may have been more a practical expediency than for reasons of secrecy as is often suggested. Since Leonardo wrote with his left hand, it is probable that it was easier for him to write from right to left. His notes and drawings display an enormous range of interests and preoccupations, some as mundane as lists of groceries and people who owed him money and some as intriguing as designs for wings and shoes for walking on water. There are compositions for paintings, studies of details and drapery, studies of faces and emotions, of animals, babies, dissections, plant studies, rock formations, whirl pools, war machines, helicopters and architecture.

These notebooks—originally loose papers of different types and sizes, distributed by friends after his death—have found their way into major collections such as the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, the Louvre, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan which holds the twelve-volume Codex Atlanticus, and British Library in London which has put a selection from its notebook ''BL Arundel MS 263'' online. The ''Codex Leicester'' is the only major scientific work of Leonardo's in private hands. It is owned by Bill Gates, and is displayed once a year in different cities around the world.

Leonardo's notes appear to have been intended for publication because many of the sheets have a form and order that would facilitate this. In many cases a single topic, for example, the heart or the human foetus, is covered in detail in both words and pictures, on a single sheet. Why they were not published within Leonardo's lifetime is unknown.

Scientific studies

Leonardo's approach to science was an observational one: he tried to understand a phenomenon by describing and depicting it in utmost detail, and did not emphasize experiments or theoretical explanation. Since he lacked formal education in Latin and mathematics, contemporary scholars mostly ignored Leonardo the scientist, although he did teach himself Latin. In the 1490s he studied mathematics under Luca Pacioli and prepared a series of drawings of regular solids in a skeletal form to be engraved as plates for Pacioli's book ''De Divina Proportione'', published in 1509.

It appears that from the content of his journals he was planning a series of treatises to be published on a variety of subjects. A coherent treatise on anatomy was said to have been observed during a visit by Cardinal Louis 'D' Aragon's secretary in 1517. Aspects of his work on the studies of anatomy, light and the landscape were assembled for publication by his pupil Francesco Melzi and eventually published as ''Treatise on Painting by Leonardo da Vinci'' in France and Italy in 1651, and Germany in 1724, with engravings based upon drawings by the Classical painter Nicholas Poussin. According to Arasse, the treatise, which in France went into sixty two editions in fifty years, caused Leonardo to be seen as "the precursor of French academic thought on art".

A recent and exhaustive analysis of Leonardo as Scientist by Frtijof Capra argues that Leonardo was a fundamentally different kind of scientist from Galileo, Newton and other scientists who followed him. Leonardo's experimentation followed clear scientific method approaches, and his theorising and hypothesising integrated the arts and particularly painting; these, and Leonardo's unique integrated, holistic views of science make him a forerunner of modern systems theory and complexity schools of thought.

Anatomy

Leonardo's formal training in the anatomy of the human body began with his apprenticeship to Andrea del Verrocchio, his teacher insisting that all his pupils learn anatomy. As an artist, he quickly became master of ''topographic anatomy'', drawing many studies of muscles, tendons and other visible anatomical features.

As a successful artist, he was given permission to dissect human corpses at the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence and later at hospitals in Milan and Rome. From 1510 to 1511 he collaborated in his studies with the doctor Marcantonio della Torre. Leonardo made over 200 pages of drawings and many pages of notes towards a treatise on anatomy. These papers were left to his heir, Francesco Melzi, for publication, a task of overwhelming difficulty because of its scope, and Leonardo's highly idiosyncratic writing. It was left incomplete at the time of Melzi's death more than fifty years later, with only a small amount of the material on anatomy included in Leonardo's ''Treatise on painting'', published in France in 1632. During the time that Melzi was ordering the material into chapters for publication, they were examined by a number of anatomists and artists, including Vasari, Cellini and Albrecht Durer who made a number of drawings from them.

Leonardo drew many studies of the human skeleton and its parts, as well as muscles and sinews. He studied the mechanical functions of the skeleton and the muscular forces that are applied to it in a manner that prefigured the modern science of biomechanics. He drew the heart and vascular system, the sex organs and other internal organs, making one of the first scientific drawings of a fetus ''in utero''. As an artist, Leonardo closely observed and recorded the effects of age and of human emotion on the physiology, studying in particular the effects of rage. He also drew many figures who had significant facial deformities or signs of illness.

Leonardo also studied and drew the anatomy of many other animals as well, dissecting cows, birds, monkeys, bears, and frogs, and comparing in his drawings their anatomical structure with that of humans. He also made a number of studies of horses.

Engineering and inventions

During his lifetime Leonardo was valued as an engineer. In a letter to Ludovico il Moro he claimed to be able to create all sorts of machines both for the protection of a city and for siege. When he fled to Venice in 1499 he found employment as an engineer and devised a system of moveable barricades to protect the city from attack. He also had a scheme for diverting the flow of the Arno River, a project on which Niccolò Machiavelli also worked. Leonardo's journals include a vast number of inventions, both practical and impractical. They include musical instruments, hydraulic pumps, reversible crank mechanisms, finned mortar shells, and a steam cannon.

In 1502, Leonardo produced a drawing of a single span bridge as part of a civil engineering project for Ottoman Sultan Beyazid II of Constantinople. The bridge was intended to span an inlet at the mouth of the Bosporus known as the Golden Horn. Beyazid did not pursue the project, because he believed that such a construction was impossible. Leonardo's vision was resurrected in 2001 when a smaller bridge based on his design was constructed in Norway. On May 17, 2006, the Turkish government decided to construct Leonardo's bridge to span the Golden Horn.

For much of his life, Leonardo was fascinated by the phenomenon of flight, producing many studies of the flight of birds, including his c. 1505 Codex on the Flight of Birds, as well as plans for several flying machines, including a light hang glider and a machine resembling a helicopter. The British television station Channel Four commissioned a documentary ''Leonardo's Dream Machines'', for broadcast in 2003. Leonardo's machines were built and tested according to his original designs. Some of those designs proved a success, whilst others fared less well when practically tested.

Leonardo the legend

Within Leonardo's own lifetime his fame was such that the King of France carried him away like a trophy, and was claimed to have supported him in his old age and held him in his arms as he died. The interest in Leonardo has never slackened. The crowds still queue to see his most famous artworks, T-shirts bear his most famous drawing and writers, like Vasari, continue to marvel at his genius and speculate about his private life and, particularly, about what one so intelligent actually believed in.

Giorgio Vasari, in the enlarged edition of ''Lives of the Artists'', 1568, introduced his chapter on Leonardo da Vinci with the following words: The continued admiration that Leonardo commanded from painters, critics and historians is reflected in many other written tributes. Baldassare Castiglione, author of ''Il Cortegiano'' ("The Courtier"), wrote in 1528: "... Another of the greatest painters in this world looks down on this art in which he is unequalled ..." while the biographer known as "Anonimo Gaddiano" wrote, c. 1540: "His genius was so rare and universal that it can be said that nature worked a miracle on his behalf ...".

The 19th century brought a particular admiration for Leonardo's genius, causing Henry Fuseli to write in 1801: "Such was the dawn of modern art, when Leonardo da Vinci broke forth with a splendour that distanced former excellence: made up of all the elements that constitute the essence of genius ..." This is echoed by A. E. Rio who wrote in 1861: "He towered above all other artists through the strength and the nobility of his talents." By the 19th century, the scope of Leonardo's notebooks was known, as well as his paintings. Hippolyte Taine wrote in 1866: "There may not be in the world an example of another genius so universal, so incapable of fulfilment, so full of yearning for the infinite, so naturally refined, so far ahead of his own century and the following centuries." The famous art historian Bernard Berenson wrote in 1896: "Leonardo is the one artist of whom it may be said with perfect literalness: Nothing that he touched but turned into a thing of eternal beauty. Whether it be the cross section of a skull, the structure of a weed, or a study of muscles, he, with his feeling for line and for light and shade, forever transmuted it into life-communicating values."

The interest in Leonardo's genius has continued unabated; experts study and translate his writings, analyse his paintings using scientific techniques, argue over attributions and search for works which have been recorded but never found. Liana Bortolon, writing in 1967, said: "Because of the multiplicity of interests that spurred him to pursue every field of knowledge ... Leonardo can be considered, quite rightly, to have been the universal genius par excellence, and with all the disquieting overtones inherent in that term. Man is as uncomfortable today, faced with a genius, as he was in the 16th century. Five centuries have passed, yet we still view Leonardo with awe."

See also

About Leonardo

Cultural depictions of Leonardo da Vinci

''Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood'' (essay)

Leonardo da Vinci's personal life

List of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci

:Category:Leonardo da Vinci paintings

Science and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci

Codex Arundel

Related subjects

Aerial perspective

Italian Renaissance painting

Leonardo da Vinci Airport

Leonardo da Vinci Art Institute

List of Italian painters

List of vegetarians

Medical Renaissance

Renaissance technology

Footnotes

References

Bibliography

volume 2: ISBN 0-486-22573-9. A reprint of the original 1883 edition. [The chapter "The Graphic Works" is by Frank Zollner & Johannes Nathan].

External links

Leonardo da Vinci: Experience, Experiment, Design (review)

Complete text & images of Richter's translation of the Notebooks

Vasari Life of Leonardo: in ''Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects''.

Web Gallery of Leonardo Paintings

Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci

Da Vinci Decoded Article from ''The Guardian''

The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?

Leonardo da Vinci's Ethical Vegetarianism

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci at BBC Science

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Nicolai Kielstrup (Vejle, Jutland, Denmark, 4 October 1991) is a young singer who participated in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest 2005.

In 2003, he was at the Junior Eurovision Song Contest in Copenhagen, as he knew one of the participants.

In 2004, he wrote "Shake, Shake, Shake", a rap song about a nervous boy who falls in love after meeting a girl on the bus on a school field trip to a pond. He performed it at the MGP Junior 2005 scoring maximum points. His resulting participation in Junior Eurovision 2005 earned him a fourth place finish.

Personal Life

Nicolai has a little sister, Natalie, who competed in MGP, but she didn't advance to Melodi Grand Prix Nordic.

Discography

Albums

He has released two albums, 'Nicolai' (2006) and 'Stage 2' (2007)

His third album 'Deja Vu - Tilbage til Mig' was released on February 2 2009.

Year	Information	Denmark	Sales and Certifications
		*First studio album	*Released: November 2006	Universal Music Group>Universal	Compact Disc>CD	9	Danish sales: 30,000	IFPI: Platinum
		*Second studio album	*Released: November 12, 2007	*Label: My Way Music	Compact Disc>CD	19	Danish sales: 25,000	IFPI: Gold
	''Dejavu - Tilbage til mig''	*Third Studio album	*Released: February 2, 2009	*Label: DiGiDi	Compact Disc>CD

External links

The Boy Choir & Soloist Directory

Nicolai Kielstrup

MySpace

References

Category:1991 births Category:Danish child singers Category:Living people Category:Danish rappers Category:Danish singer-songwriters Category:People from Vejle Municipality

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