POET+BIOGRAPHY

Though his family was from New England, Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St.Louis, Missouri, on September 16 th , 1888 (Nobel, Camden). The man’s life was full of changes from there on out, among them a permanent move to Britain in 1927; but the most changes in his life came from the recognition he received from his poetry, and those works won him many awards, including a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 (Nobel). Eliot never quite met the classic standards of a poet as was known at the time his works were published- he was a well-known modernist- but revolutionized the genre nonetheless from the moment he came onto the scene.

Having grown up with a congenital double hernia (a sac formed on the abdomen from birth), Eliot was the youngest child in a financially secure and loving family. However, he grew up rather isolated due to his illness and thus literature and the city of St. Louis itself became his primary sources for his writing (Modern). After having gone to multiple colleges, Eliot’s rise to poetry finally began in 1910 and 1911. At this point he began his breakout poem: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Though the poem was not immediately published, it was immediately praised by Eliot’s lifelong friend Conrad Aiken, who stated “The //wholeness// is there, from the very beginning” (Modern). Soon after, in 1915, Eliot impulsively married a governess named Vivien Haigh-Wood; however, the relationship was very unhappy throughout. They separated in 1933, although no divorce was finalized until her death in 1947 at a mental asylum (Academy, Camden). Two years after his marriage, with the encouragement and support of renowned fellow Modernist poet Ezra Pound, Eliot published his first book, //Prufrock and Other Observations.// At this time, he was an employee of Lloyd’s Bank, reviewing and editing (Camden, Modern).

 Much of Eliot’s poetry in the early 1920s was influenced by his family life. Following the death of his father and a visit with his mother and sister, he suffered a nervous breakdown, one that is thought to have influenced what is considered one of his most major works: “The Waste Land”, published in 1922 (Camden, Modern). Some of Eliot’s most famous lines- namely the opening, “April is the cruelest month”- come from that poem.

Eliot’s last major poems were later published in 1943: //Four Quartets// (Camden). Influenced by a Europe currently in wartime, the work was praised by newer readers of his work, but somewhat disgraced by older fans who had gone out of their way to read from the work of an out-of-place, strangely unique writer (Modern). After its publication, Eliot devoted the rest of his writing life to plays; among them were //Murder in the Cathedral// and //The Cocktail Party;// the Broadway production of the latter later won a Tony Award (Academy) (Poetry). In 1948, a year after his estranged wife Vivien’s death, Eliot won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work and was bestowed the Order of Merit by King George VI (Nobel, Camden). In 1957 he remarried the much younger Valerie Fletcher, and finally gained a stable relationship that lasted until the end of his life (Modern). Upon his death in London on January 4th, 1965, his chosen epitaph was a line from //Four Quartets-// “In the beginning is my end. In the end is my beginning” (Academy, Modern).

Eliot’s odd sense of writing may have come from his own odd view on poetry’s use; he said that all it took was “to be very intelligent” (Poetry). He was a serious but not unkind person, though thought to be cynical by many critics- and even his close friend and mentor, Ezra Pound, called him an “old Possum” (Poetry). In any case, many of the most resounding lines, metaphors and similes in English poetry come from Eliot, and his legacy is a large influence on the genre as a whole.