T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888, into a family of New England descent with strong traditions of public service and Unitarian piety. He studied philosophy at Harvard and spent periods in Paris and at Marburg and Oxford before settling in England in 1914, where Ezra Pound became his champion. A hasty marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915 brought years of mutual distress. He taught school, reviewed, and from 1917 worked in the foreign department of Lloyds Bank, writing in the margins of a crowded life.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock announced a new idiom: ironic, urban, allusive, shaped by the French Symbolists and the Jacobean dramatists. The Waste Land (1922), cut and sharpened with Pound’s help, assembled voices, myths and quotations into a portrait of a civilisation in pieces and became the defining poem of its era. As a critic, in essays such as ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, and as editor of The Criterion, he reshaped literary taste. In 1925 he joined the publishing house that became Faber & Faber, and in 1927 he was received into the Church of England and became a British subject. His later work — Ash-Wednesday, Murder in the Cathedral and above all Four Quartets — turned toward meditation on time, faith and history.

In 1948 Eliot received both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize. He devoted much of his later career to verse drama for the commercial stage, including The Cocktail Party. A second marriage, to Valerie Fletcher in 1957, brought him late happiness. He died in London in 1965. His authority has been contested, not least over the antisemitic passages in his early verse, but his innovations remain foundational to modern poetry in English.