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Introduction About T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot was an American-born poet, playwright, literary critic and editor who is regarded as one of the twentieth century's major poets. He lived in St. Louis during his early life and attended Harvard University, later moving to Paris and London where he came under the influence of Ezra Pound. Eliot published several influential works including The Waste Land in 1922 and Four Quartets in 1943. He was also a prominent literary critic and published works exploring social and religious conservatism. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 and died in London in 1965.

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Introduction About T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot was an American-born poet, playwright, literary critic and editor who is regarded as one of the twentieth century's major poets. He lived in St. Louis during his early life and attended Harvard University, later moving to Paris and London where he came under the influence of Ezra Pound. Eliot published several influential works including The Waste Land in 1922 and Four Quartets in 1943. He was also a prominent literary critic and published works exploring social and religious conservatism. Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 and died in London in 1965.

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Sr Chandrodaya J
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Introduction about the Author

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888. He lived in St. Louis during
the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In 1910, he left the United States for the
Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and master’s degrees and having contributed several poems to
the Harvard Advocate.

After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and
settled in England in 1914. The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in
London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.

It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his
poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other
Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the ultra-modern
age. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the single most
influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic
proportions; by 1930, and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary
criticism in the English-speaking world.

As a poet, he transmuted (transformed) his affinity (likeness) for the English metaphysical poets of the
seventeenth century and the nineteenth century into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject
matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post–World War I
generation with the values and principles—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he
had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to
orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism. His
major later poetry collections include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943); his books of literary
and social criticism include The Sacred Wood (1920), The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism (1933), After Strange Gods (1934), and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1940). Eliot was
also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion,
and The Cocktail Party.

He became a British citizen in 1927; long associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber, he
published many younger poets, and eventually became director of the firm. After a notoriously unhappy first
marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in 1933, and remarried Valerie Fletcher in 1956. T. S. Eliot
received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He died in London on January 4, 1965.

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