Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, playwright, publisher, and literary critic. He was born to a Boston Brahmin family living in St. Louis, Missouri. The youngest of six children, his father was a well-to-do businessman and his mother a poetry-writing social worker. A double inguinal hernia kept Eliot frequently indoors and isolated as a boy, which he found escape from in constant reading. He attended Smith Academy, where he studied both classical and living languages and began writing, publishing two poems and three short stories in the school newspaper. After a year at Milton Academy, he studied at Harvard, where he earned his B.A. and an M.A. in English literature and began publishing in the Harvard Advocate. He also encountered Symbolist writing, which deeply affected his life and later writings, and befriended the writer Conrad Aiken.
Eliot spent the next five years in academia, working as an assistant at Harvard, studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, then moving back to Harvard to study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy. There, he fell in love with Emily Hale, his on-and-off muse and correspondent for much of his life. In 1914, Eliot went to Oxford on a scholarship, just as World War I broke out. Frustrated with the circumscribed atmosphere of the university town, he began spending time in London, where he met Ezra Pound via an introduction from Aiken. The more established Pound would become a major promoter of Eliot’s work, introducing him to figures such as William Butler Yeats.
In 1915, Pound helped to place Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry magazine, earning him attention on both sides of the Atlantic for his groundbreaking style and shocking content. That same year, Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, forming a union that quickly became unhappy due to both of their physical and mental health concerns and chemical dependencies. Eliot taught at several institutions before taking a job at Lloyds Bank in 1917. Also in that year, he published Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), his first volume of poetry, with Pound’s assistance. He published critical essays copiously during this time and began editing the journal Criterion in 1922. He remained at Lloyds until 1925, when he became director at publishing house Faber and Gwyer, which later became Faber and Faber. In that role, he took on work from major poets including W. H. Auden, John Berryman, and Ted Hughes. In 1927, he renounced his American citizenship to become a British subject and converted to his own Anglo-Catholic version of Anglicanism.
A deliberate writer with long gaps in his publication history, Eliot published only two major works in the 1920s, The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men.” Both were highly regarded, formally innovative poems examining the hopelessness of the post-war generation; The Waste Land is considered by many scholars to be the twentieth century’s most influential poetic work. "Ash Wednesday" (1930) and Four Quartets (1943) followed, as did seven plays, including Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949), the latter of which won a Tony Award for Best Play. He also published Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), the book of light verse that inspired the musical Cats, winner of seven Tony Awards. During these years, he separated from his wife, leading to her confinement in a mental institution. In 1957, after Haigh-Wood’s death, he remarried to his 30-year-old secretary, Esmé Valerie Fletcher.
Eliot’s revolutionary work in structure, style, sound, and language were essential to the birth of Modernism. In trampling the vestiges of 19th-century tradition and considering and reimagining texts from The Divine Comedy to Baudelaire to the Upanishads, Eliot helped create a new literary school honest to the trauma of the first World War and an increasingly secularized, industrialized world. Eliot was a pivotal influence on generations of writers around the world, from fellow modernists Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald to preeminent later figures like Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, and Seamus Heaney. His awards and honors include the British Order of Merit, the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and thirteen honorary doctorates. He died of emphysema in London in 1965.
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More T. S. Eliot
Text: Read poems by Eliot at the Academy of American Poets
Video: Watch a course on Eliot by Duke University professor Victor Strandberg
Audio: Listen to Eliot read "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"