T.S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot wrote the defining poem of modernism and became the most powerful literary critic in England. Born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888 into a prominent New England family that had moved west, he studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford, and settled in England in 1914, becoming a British subject in 1927. He worked at Lloyds Bank for eight years and then at the publisher Faber, where he stayed for the rest of his career and where he published Auden, Pound, Ted Hughes and Joyce. Ezra Pound recognised him immediately and got The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock into print in 1915. The Waste Land appeared in 1922. Its five sections move without transition between voices, languages and centuries, quoting Dante, the Upanishads, Wagner and music-hall song, and it was read as the definitive statement of European exhaustion after the war. Pound cut it by roughly half, and Eliot dedicated it to him as the better craftsman. His first marriage, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, was wretched for both; she was institutionalised in 1938 and died in 1947, and he did not visit her. He converted to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, and the later poetry — Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets — is religious and formally calmer. He wrote verse drama, including Murder in the Cathedral. His criticism reshaped the canon, elevating the metaphysical poets and Dante and demoting Milton and the Romantics. Some of the early prose and poetry contains antisemitic passages that are still debated. He received the Nobel Prize in 1948 and died in 1965.

• Lived: 1888 CE – 1965 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: poet