The Private Conversion of a Public Man

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is largely seen as the epitome of modernist thought and expression, and yet T.S. Eliot’s life is enigmatic as a modernist voice considering his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in June, 1927. His faith is expressed in few of his works but perhaps most present in the Four Quartets. I am interested in exploring the reasons for his conversion as expressed in his poetry, and the influences of his conversion on his poetry. My book will examine this transition in Eliot’s life as expressed from The Waste Land (1921) to the Four Quartets (1942) which will act as two ends of a continuum. In the text that follows, I survey Eliot's conversion not to evaluate its merit or sincerity, but to define it as a feature of his life that is in many ways at an inadequate stage of study.