About the Author

Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1948), Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis on September 26, 1888, into a family with deep New England Unitarian ties. As an American ex-patriot, however, he became a citizen of Great Britain in 1927. Eliot's literary achievements mark him today as one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. Breaking from conventional and traditional poetic forms, Eliot's free verse became a vehicle of expression in the modernist movement in literature.

A brilliant student, Eliot entered Harvard University in 1906, completing both his undergraduate degree in comparative literature and English and a Masters Degree in only four years. Serving on the Board of the Advocate, Harvard's literary magazine, he found acceptance in the University's literary conversations, including the company of fellow student Conrad Aiken who became a life-long friend. Discovering Arthur Symon's works, Eliot was deeply influenced by his readings of the "Symbolists" that helped to focus his own early poetry (see Ronald Bush's biographical essay, "T. S. Eliot's Life and Career" <http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/life.htm>).

Following coursework in Cambridge, Eliot continued his studies during a year abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris where he met Jean Verdenal, killed afterwards in World War I, to whom Eliot would dedicate "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." A year later, he returned for a short period once again at Harvard where he began his ill-fated Ph.D. program (his dissertation was published in 1964, only a year before he died). During the summer, Eliot pursued studies at Marburg, Germany, but the war forced his departure, and he relocated in London for an academic sojourn at Merton College at Oxford University. There, with an introduction from Aiken, Eliot met Ezra Pound whose works Eliot had ignored as a student a couple of years earlier. Pound read his manuscripts and praised them, initiating one of the most important literary collaborations in the twentieth century.

While at Oxford, Eliot met a young, vivacious British dancer, Vivien Haigh-Wood, with whom he instantly fell in love, and within months, they were married. Her refusal to travel to the United States during the war, however, led him to remain in Britain, a decision that estranged him from his parents who were deeply concerned about his young wife's mental instability and Eliot's own failure to complete his doctoral dissertation. Eliot and his wife began their life together with the support of Bertrand Russell, and Eliot worked at various teaching and lecturing assignments, trying to secure a meager income. In 1917, however, he joined Lloyd's bank in London where he served as a translator in the foreign section, putting to good use his considerable facilities in several languages. The position gave him, finally, the financial security he had sought so desperately, and he turned his attention feverishly to writing poetry.

Eliot's big break came in 1917 with the publication of Prufrock and Other Observations, supported with the financial backing of Ezra Pound. This ambitious work was followed by "Portrait of a Lady" and "The Waste Land" in 1922. Carefully orchestrated in its promotion, "The Waste Land" appeared first in London's Criterion and a month later in New York's The Dial and in book form (Perkins note). The latter work grew out of a period of extended rest in Europe following a nervous breakdown. The difficulties with his American family, Vivien's declining mental and physical condition, then finally the death of his father had taken their toll, but "The Waste Land" complemented "Prufrock" as one of the most powerful expressions of the social and political ennui extruded from the horrors of and the meaninglessness derived from the First World War. At the same time, however, it reflects Eliot's own personal faith and spiritual hope, symbolized in allusions to both Eastern and Western myth and religious traditions.

The wide acclaim he secured in his "modernist" works Eliot parleyed into additional appointments. While continuing his work in the bank, Eliot also accepted in 1922 the position of editor of the European-oriented literary journal, Criterion, which gave him a continuously visible international voice. In 1923-24, he joined the staff of the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer (Faber and Faber) as its literary editor, a position that made it possible for him to retire from his work at Lloyd's Bank.

An enigmatic figure, T. S. Eliot enjoyed, over the next two decades, the most prestigious honors that Europe and America could bestow upon a writer. He delivered the Clark Lectures at Cambridge, England, and the Norton Lectures at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 recognized the obvious achievements. Yet, with all the honors, Eliot lived at moments a desperate life, continuously struggling within a debilitating marriage that ended only after the commitment of Vivien to an asylum and her subsequent death in 1947. The honors, so well earned, seemed ephemeral, and he felt himself at times the "hollow man." Out of the psychic pain, however, T. S. Eliot discovered religious renewal.

Seeming to reject the heritage of his American family's generations in the Unitarian faith, T. S. Eliot drew spiritual succor from his experiences in the English Anglican Church. His grounding there that included many years of work in the service of his local church was a stimulus for his Christian apologies in drama and poetry. As an expression of his faith, he composed such works as The Rock (1934),a Christian pageant, and for his Bishop, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a dramatization of the assassination of Archbishop Thomas à Beckett at his church in Canterbury in 1170 A.D. Other dramatic works would follow with varying critical success: "The Family Reunion" (1939), "The Cocktail Party" (1950), and "The Confidential Clerk" (1953). Interestingly, the smash Broadway musical hit, "Cats," an adaptation of his whimsical 1939 feline work, "Old Possum's Book on Practical Cats" has done more than any other factor to keep Eliot's name in popular circulation.

His last years Eliot spent quietly and much more comfortably. In 1957, ten years after the death of Vivien, he married Valerie Fletcher, finding what Rush calls "a degree of contentment that had eluded him all his life."

A writer who crossed the spectrum of genres, T. S. Eliot composed both essays and dramas, in addition to his poetry. A book of essays, For Lancelot Andrewes, appeared in 1928, and Four Quartets in 1943, another collection of poetry. Burnt Norton and The Four Quartets, among his latter works maintained his status as a central literary figure at the mid twentieth century, but there remains so much more. Rush includes "his extended appreciation of Dante (1929); his free rendition of Anabasis: A Poem by St. -J. Perse (1930); the collection of his Selected Essays 1917-1932 (1932; rev. ed., 1950); his Norton lectures, The Use of Poetry and theUse of Criticism (1933); his pugnacious and never reprinted Page-Barbour lectures, After Strange Gods (1934) . . . The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes towards the Definition of Culture, (1948); and the late collections of essays On Poetry and Poets (1957) and To Criticize the Critic (1965). Eliot's Poems Written in Early Youth were collected and printed in 1950, his Harvard Ph.D. dissertation was published in 1964 as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, and the first volume of his Letters appeared in 1988" (From American National Biography. Ed. John A Garraty and Mark C. Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Copyright © 1999 by the American Council of Learned Societies. < http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/eliot/life.htm >

Widely acclaimed early in his career for his work in the modernist tradition, T. S. Eliot was the recipient of many awards and was read appreciatively on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The canon of his work, however, is so much broader than the heavy brooding of "Prufrock," "The Waste Land," and "The Hollow Men," exhibiting Eliot's solid grounding in world literature and mythology; a classical literary style, indebtedness to European Renaissance arts and letters; and sympathetic intellectual appeals to spirituality. Important criticism includes Eliot's The Sacred Wood (1920), the first codified expression of his literary aesthetic; The Uses of Poetry and the Uses of Criticism (1933); and Essays: Ancient and Modern (1936).

Criticism of T. S. Eliot's work has both given and taken away, his contemporary reading audience as diffuse, today, perhaps, as that of Pound's. Rush notes William Carlos Williams' dismissal of Eliot's works as too "academic," a kiss of death for a popular culture entranced by different media and little appreciation for erudite and demanding literature.

T. S. Eliot's literary life spanned the emergence and flowering of the defining movements of the twentieth century. While quick to acknowledge the support and influence of others in his creative life, few writers live to witness the impact of their ideas and works as did Eliot. He died on January 4, 1965, and, as he had instructed, his ashes were interred on the grounds of St.Michael's Church in East Coker, a resting place befitting the remains of a man of faith.