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Macey H. Graves media type="custom" key="15380274"

It goes without saying that T.S. Eliot was one of the most influential poets of the 20th century, even with the lack of public knowledge about him that is associated with many other poets of the time. So many famous lines of literature come from his work- //April is the cruelest month// (“The Waste Land), //This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper// (“The Hollow Men”), and so many others are all his doing. He was a pioneer of the Modernist line of literature, something which he took as his own personal brand of mythological and literary references combined with difficult language and a long string of ideas, especially death itself. First publishing in 1915, he continued working until his release of //Four Quartets// in 1944.

Poetry seems to have been the man’s one rock; born in the United States, he moved to Britain and stayed there for the rest of his life afterward, and was unable to keep up a marriage to his first wife- whom he never divorced despite a separation of decades. Through this long period of life jostled and unkempt (something that two world wars only complimented), poetry seems to have been his one true calling and focal point. In any case, it is impossible to ignore Eliot’s contribution to English poetry and English literature as a whole. If not for him, the modernist genre may not have reached the heights it did during its explosion in the early 1900s.