T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

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T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot was born to a distinguished New England family, raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Havard University, the Sorbonne, and Oxford University, where he wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on the English logician and metaphysician F.H. Bradly. The critic Arthur Symons’ work on the French symbolists was a seminal influence on Eliot, as was the poet Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to stay in Europe. From 1917 until 1925 he worked in the International Department at Lloyd’s Bank, after which he joined the publishing the work of W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and other young poets. He also edited the Egoist magazine and founded the influential Criterion. In 1927 Eliot took British citizenship and joined the Church of England. In his later years, he wrote compelling critical studies on literature, culture, society, and religion, ad generally is considered the most influential critic of the century. In addition, he dismissed The Waste Land, which he wrote largely while hospitalized for a breakdown in 1921, as “the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life,” his generation considered it a definitive explication of its distress. Eliot intended to amalgamate the disparate “fragments” in the poem- taken from classical, English, and European literature, Hindu texts, and popular culture, and spoken by multiple voices and characters – into a new whole offering a form of spiritual renewal. The Waste Land (which Pound helped edit), like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (which Pound helped publish) and other early poems of Eliot’s, comments on the barrenness of modern civilization and displays a rich complexity of tone, which ranges from satiric to lyrical and elegiac. Eliot’s later work documents his conversion to Christianity and culminates in Four Quartets, which he considered his masterpiece. (Biographical Summary from Norton's Anthology of Poetry, 4th Edition.)