T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St Louis, Missouri. He studied philosophy at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Merton College, Oxford, subsequently settling in England in 1914. After working as a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, he became a literary editor and later the director of Faber & Faber. Eliot formed a friendship with Ezra Pound in London and during these years also founded the influential literary journal Criterion. His ideas quickly solidified into doctrine and came to form, together with the essays of I.A. Richards, the basis of the New Criticism. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen, renouncing his American citizenship.

In his creative work, Eliot first attracted widespread attention for his poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ in 1915. His undoubtedly best-known work, The Waste Land (1922), is generally considered as one of the most important poems of the twentieth century and a cornerstone of Modernist verse. In 1943, Eliot published Four Quartets – a meditation on time, culture and collective memory. It is often considered the culmination of his literary oeuvre that led to him being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Eliot was also a playwright of seven acclaimed plays, including Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949).

Eliot died of emphysema in 1965 and was buried at East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his forebearers had emigrated to the United States in the seventeenth century and which gave its name to the second poem of his Four Quartets.