Who is t.s. eliot

T homas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. He founded and, during the seventeen years of its publication , edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion. In , Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church.

The poet also edited the journal throughout the span of its publication He officially became a British citizen in Whatever else was afoot, Eliot continued to write, and his major later poems include "Ash Wednesday" and "Four Quartets" For his vast influence—in poetry, criticism and drama— Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature in We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives.

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He was a foreigner in a society, literary London, that is almost as incestuous and xenophobic as intellectual Paris. The writers he counted as comrades were looked upon by most of the literary establishment with distaste: Ezra Pound, an American; Wyndham Lewis, whose father was an American; and an Irishman, James Joyce.

There was not much love lost on their parts, either. He was cut off from his family by the war; he was married to an unhealthy, demanding, and unstable woman; and he had troubles all his own. At the height of his creative and critical output, he had a nervous breakdown and diagnosed his condition as aboulie —lack of will.

They take up almost two thousand pages. The inside view makes the success only a little easier to understand. Eliot was not just inscrutable; he performed inscrutability. He came across as a man who had got trapped inside an elaborate, Chaplinesque joke of his own devising.

But what was within? His queer coloured, strangely piercing eyes in a pale face are the most striking thing about him. His questions are surprising—disconcerting because so simple, sometimes also inane. He plugged himself in. The letters show that he knew what he was doing. He was persistent, and he understood how the game was played.

It is like being always on dress parade—one can never relax. It is a great strain. And society is in a way much harder, not gentler. They are more spontaneous, and also more deliberate. They are always intriguing and caballing; one must be very alert. They are sensitive, and easily become enemies. But it is never dull.

He saw that, among people so high-strung and self-centered, being an outsider, someone who appeared to have no personal stake in things, could be a source of authority. More important, he held all the English writers in contempt. It was a cool and disinterested contempt; it came from arrogance, not from pettiness or insecurity, and he gave just enough of a hint of it to make people nervous.

The only contemporary writers he considered his peers were Pound and Lewis though he knew their limitations extremely well. The only one he looked up to was Joyce. That London was the square of the board Eliot landed on was something of an accident.

If he had picked a city to expatriate to, it would probably have been Paris, where he spent a very happy year after graduating from Harvard College, in But he had not intended to emigrate at all. When he arrived in England, in August, , just after the outbreak of the First World War, he was on a fellowship from the Harvard philosophy department. He planned to spend a year at Oxford, reading Aristotle and writing his dissertation, and then return to the United States and become a professor.

He liked Aristotle. He disliked Oxford. Alfred Prufrock. He encouraged Eliot to make more poems. She was English, and working as a governess.

Three months later, without informing their parents, they married. Eliot was twenty-six and, before they met, almost certainly a virgin. She was a party girl, unrefined, vivacious, and self-dramatizing—pretty much everything he was not. I think that all I wanted of Vivienne was a flirtation or mild affair: I was too shy and unpracticed to achieve either with anybody.

Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. In , he left the United States for the Sorbonne, having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and having contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. After a year in Paris, he returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in philosophy, but returned to Europe and settled in England in The following year, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London, first as a teacher, and later for Lloyd's Bank.

It was in London that Eliot came under the influence of his contemporary Ezra Pound , who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in a number of magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations , was published in , and immediately established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde. With the publication of The Waste Land in , now considered by many to be the single most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow to nearly mythic proportions; by , and for the next thirty years, he was the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world.

As a poet, he transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century most notably John Donne and the nineteenth century French symbolist poets including Baudelaire and Laforgue into radical innovations in poetic technique and subject matter. His poems in many respects articulated the disillusionment of a younger post—World War I generation with the values and conventions—both literary and social—of the Victorian era. As a critic also, he had an enormous impact on contemporary literary taste, propounding views that, after his conversion to orthodox Christianity in the late thirties, were increasingly based in social and religious conservatism.

After a notoriously unhappy first marriage, Eliot separated from his first wife in , and remarried Valerie Fletcher in