T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot, known to family and friends as Tom, was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965. He was a poet, essayist, and playwright, and became a leading figure of modernist poetry in the English language. His work changed what a poem could sound like through its use of language, writing style, and verse structure. His essays also made him a force in literary criticism, often re-evaluating long-held cultural beliefs.

Eliot came from a prominent Boston Brahmin family with roots in England and New England. His paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis to establish a Unitarian Christian church. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman, and his mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, wrote poetry and worked as a social worker, then a new profession in the United States. Eliot was the youngest of six surviving children, and St. Louis marked him deeply. He later wrote that “Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world.”

As a child, Eliot was drawn inward by a congenital double inguinal hernia that kept him from many physical activities. Often isolated, he became absorbed in books, especially tales of savage life, the Wild West, and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. From 1898 to 1905 he attended Smith Academy, where he studied Ancient Greek, Latin, French, and German. He began writing poetry at 14 under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. His first published poem, “A Fable For Feasters,” appeared in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905.

After a preparatory year at Milton Academy, Eliot studied at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning a Bachelor of Arts, then a Master of Arts in English literature the next year. In 1908 he discovered Arthur Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. He later studied philosophy in Paris, attended lectures by Henri Bergson, and returned to Harvard to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. In 1914 he went to Merton College, Oxford, but he spent much of his time in London, where Ezra Pound quickly judged him “worth watching” and helped bring him into literary circles.

Eliot first drew wide attention with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in 1915, a poem considered outlandish when it appeared. It was followed by The Waste Land in 1922, “The Hollow Men” in 1925, Ash Wednesday in 1930, and Four Quartets in 1943. He also wrote seven plays, including Murder in the Cathedral in 1935 and The Cocktail Party in 1949. Having moved to England in 1914, he settled, worked, and married there, became a British subject in 1927, and renounced his American citizenship. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.” His words still carry weight because they came from a mind shaped by many places, languages, books, and beliefs, yet pressed always toward exact expression.