Background:
Eliot (1888-1965) was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, into a distinguished
New England family; his mother was a poet.
Eliot was educated at Harvard University, the Sorbonne, and the
University of Oxford. He became a
resident of London in 1915, and in 1927 became a naturalized British citizen and
was confirmed in the Church of England. Between
1915 and 1919 Eliot worked several jobs, including those of teacher, bank clerk,
and assistant editor of the literary magazine Egoist.
He quickly distinguished himself as a poet and a critic.
Eliot is best know for his poem The
Wasteland (1922), which was published in five parts.
His first important piece, however, was The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), published when the poet was
twenty-seven. Later, he produced
poems such as Ash Wednesday (1930), The
Rock (1934), and Four Quartets
(1943), which is generally considered by critics to be Eliot’s best poem.
Eliot received many awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1948 and the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964.
Eliot also wrote plays and prose works, including The
Idea of a Christian Society (1940) and Notes
Toward a Definition of Culture (1948).
Web resources: The Academy of American Poets maintains page on Eliot with helpful links to other sources. A brief biographical note on Eliot is available at the Nobel Laureate site. The Modern American Poetry site, maintained at the University of Illinois, provides several links to biographical and interpretative material on Eliot, including a couple of brief critical analyses of “The Journey of the Magi.” The T. S. Eliot page mainained at the University of Georgia provides many useful links to Eliot’s poetry and to resources about him.
Discussion
questions:
To
what does the term, “magi,” (359) in the title of the poem refer?
What is the mood that the poem sets up with the first sentence?
What is behind the expression of “regret” (in line 8)?
Why did they prefer, “at the end,” to travel all night and with
voices saying it was all folly? Why was it “dawn” when they found the “temperate
valley”? Why was “the place,”
once they found it, “satisfactory”? Even
though the narrator declares, a long time later, that the journey would be
undertaken again, he raises a perplexing question.
What is the relationship between birth and death?
What did that birth and death have to do with their birth and death?
Why was it “bitter agony”? Why
were they no longer at easy in their kingdoms?
What does the last line mean? What
does this poem have to do with a search for value and meaning?