Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 September 1888-4 January 1965) was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor. One of the 20th century's major poets, he is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25 and went on to settle, work, and marry there. He became a British citizen in 1927 at the age of 39, subsequently renouncing his American citizenship.
Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 1915, which was received as a modernist masterpiece. It was followed by some best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1943).
He was also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry.
The Eliots were a Boston Brahmin family, with roots in England and New England. Eliot's paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to St. Louis, Missouri, to establish a Unitarian Christian church there. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843–1929), who wrote poetry, was a social worker, which was a new profession in the U.S. in the early 20th century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns.
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Eliot's childhood infatuation with literature can be ascribed to several factors. First, he had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double inguinal hernia, he could not participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from socializing with his peers. As he was often isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy immediately became obsessed with books, favouring tales of savage life, the Wild West, or Mark Twain's thrill-seeking Tom Sawyer.
From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, the boys' college preparatory division of Washington University, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German.
He began to write poetry when he was 14 under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing, and he destroyed them.
He also published three short stories in 1905, Birds of Prey, A Tale of a Whale and The Man Who Was King. The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration of the Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis. Such a link with indigenous peoples importantly antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard. After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne.
In 1915, he taught English at Birkbeck, University of London.
In 1916, he completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, but he failed to return for the viva voce exam.
Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably at Highgate School in London, where he taught French and Latin: his students included John Betjeman.
Charles Whibley recommended T.S. Eliot to Geoffrey Faber. In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds to become a director in the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber, where he remained for the rest of his career. At Faber and Faber, he was responsible for publishing distinguished English poets, including W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Charles Madge and Ted Hughes.
More information: Poetry Foundation
Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken to St Michael and All Angels' Church, East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors had emigrated to America.
Eliot was commemorated by the placement of a large stone in the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey. The stone, cut by designer Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates, his Order of Merit, and a quotation from his poem Little Gidding, the communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living.
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For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small number of poems. He was aware of this even early in his career.
Eliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism, and strongly influenced the school of New Criticism. He was somewhat self-deprecating and minimizing of his work, and once said his criticism was merely a by-product of his private poetry-workshop.
T.S. Eliot influenced many poets, novelists, and songwriters, including Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máirtín Ó Díreáin, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Bob Dylan, Hart Crane, William Gaddis, Allen Tate, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Trevor Nunn, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Russell Kirk, George Seferis, who in 1936 published a modern Greek translation of The Waste Land, and James Joyce.
T. S. Eliot was a strong influence on 20th-century Caribbean poetry written in English, including the epic Omeros (1990) by Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, and Islands (1969) by Barbadian Kamau Brathwaite.
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but an escape from emotion;
it is not the expression of personality,
but an escape from personality.
But, of course,
only those who have personality and emotions know
what it means to want to escape from these things.
T. S. Eliot
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