What do you mean by 1+1? Do you want that to be evaluated or do you want an expression that can be evaluated?
odow’s answer was the solution for both of those things. Meta.parse gives you the expression :(1 + 1), which can be evaluated using eval.
Meta.parse("name") will give you :name sure, but that’s just a symbol, and isn’t attached to any variable. Using eval on that symbol will be in the global scope, which is typically not what you want.
But it’s important to know why you want to do this, because it’s typically a pretty bad idea.