ABSTRACT
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was one of the greatest poets and most influential critics of our time. Born in St Louis, Missouri, he was educated at Harvard and Oxford universities, and also studied for short periods in France and Germany. In 1914 he settled permanently in England, and became a naturalized citizen in 1927. His first major poem, The Love Song of 1. Alfred Prufrock appeared in 1915. The Waste Land, which made Eliot the poetic spokesman of his generation, was published in 1922. In the meantime Eliot had become the friend and protege of Ezra Pound (see above, pp. 57-68) and had begun to publish the essays and reviews that were collected in The Sacred Wood (1920). In 1922 Eliot founded his own journal, The Criterion, which he edited until 1939. After earning his living as a banker for some years, Eliot joined the publishing firm of Faber and Faber, of which he eventually became a director. In the Preface to a volume of essays, For Lancelot Andrewes (1928), Eliot described his beliefs as 'classical in literature, royalist in politics, anglocatholic in religion', and these attitudes became more marked in his prose and verse through the subsequent decade. The Collected Poems 1909-35 (1936) and Four Quartets (1944) comprise the essential canon of his poetry. In 1935 he produced a verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral, and subsequently wrote several more verse plays of which the most successful was The Cocktail Party (1950). In 1948 T. S. Eliot's career was crowned with the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature and the Order of Merit.
