T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot was a groundbreaking 20th century poet who is known widely for his work "The Waste Land."

QUICK FACTS

NAME

T.S. Eliot

OCCUPATION

Writer

BIRTH DATE

September 26, 1888

DEATH DATE

January 4, 1965

DID YOU KNOW?

T.S. Eliot was as renowned for his literary criticism as he was for his poetry.

EDUCATION

The Sorbonne, Harvard University, Smith Academy, Merton College

PLACE OF BIRTH

St. Louis, Missouri

PLACE OF DEATH

London, England, United Kingdom

AKA

Thomas Eliot

T.S. Eliot

FULL NAME

Thomas Stearns Eliot

T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He published his first poetic masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in 1915. In 1921, he wrote the poem "The Waste Land" while recovering from exhaustion. The dense, allusion-heavy poem went on to redefine the genre and become one of the most talked about poems in literary history. For his lifetime of poetic innovation, Eliot won the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Part of the ex-pat community of the 1920s, he spent most of his life in Europe, dying in London, England, in 1965.

He died of emphysema in London, having renounced his American citizenship, at the age of 76. On the second anniversary of his death, he was memorialized with a stone marker in Westminster Abbey, in the so-called Poets' Corner, which contains the graves of Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, and a host of others. The first poet laid to rest in the space was Geoffrey Chaucer in the year 1400. Interestingly, though the whole Poet’s Corner tradition owes itself to the placement of his tomb, Chaucer’s burial in Westminster Abby was actually not a result of his fame as a poet, but to his position as the Palace of Westminster’s Clerk of Works.

The Poetry

It was around this time that T.S. Eliot began a lifelong friendship with American poet Ezra Pound, who immediately recognized Eliot's poetic genius and worked to publish his work. The first poem of this period, and the first of Eliot's important works, was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which appeared in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, followed in 1917, and the collection established Eliot as a leading poet of his day. While writing poetry and tending to his day job, Eliot was busy writing literary criticism and reviews, and his work in the criticism field would become as respected as his poetry.

In 1919, Eliot published Poems, which contained "Gerontion." The poem was a blank-verse interior monologue, and it was unlike anything that had ever been written in the English language. As if that didn't garner enough attention, in 1922 Eliot saw the publication of "The Waste Land," a colossal and complex examination of postwar disillusionment. At the time he wrote the poem, Eliot's marriage was failing, and he and his wife were both experiencing "nervous disorders."

"The Waste Land" almost immediately developed a cult-like following from all literary corners, and it is often considered the most influential poetic work of the 20th century. The same year "The Waste Land" was published, Eliot founded what would become an influential literary journal called Criterion. The poet also edited the journal throughout the span of its publication (1922-1939). Two years later, Eliot left his bank post to join the publishing house Faber & Faber, where he would remain for the rest of his career, shepherding the writing of many young poets. (He officially became a British citizen in 1927.)

Whatever else was afoot, Eliot continued to write, and his major later poems include "Ash Wednesday" (1930) and "Four Quartets" (1943). During this period he also wrote The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods(1934) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). For his vast influence—in poetry, criticism and drama—T.S. Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

If you want to know more about this author, go to the link below:

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/t-s-eliot