Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot, a brick manufacturer, and Charlotte (Stearns) Eliot, who was active in social reform and was herself a not-untalented poet. Both parents were descended from families that had emigrated from England to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. William Greenleaf Eliot, the poet’s paternal grandfather, had, after his graduation from Harvard in the 1830s, moved to St. Louis, where he became a Unitarian minister, but the New England connection was closely maintained–especially, during Eliot’s youth, through the family’s summer home on the Atlantic coastEliot attended Miss Locke’s Primary School and Smith Academy in St. Louis. His first poems and prose pieces appeared in the Smith Academy Record in 1905, the year of his graduation. He spent the 1905-1906 academic year at Milton Academy, a private prep school in Massachusetts, and then entered Harvard University, beginning his studies on September 26, 1906, his eighteenth birthday. There, he published frequently in the Harvard Advocate, took courses with such professors as Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, the latter of whom influenced Eliot through his classicism and emphasis upon tradition, and also studied the poetry of Dante, who would prove to be a lifelong source of enthusiasm and inspiration.
Eliot received his B.A. in 1909, and stayed at Harvard to earn a master’s degree in English literature, which was conferred the following year. Beginning in the fall of 1910, he spent a year in Paris, reading, writing (including “The Winter Evening Settles Down” and “The Boston Evening Transcript,” although he would not publish again until 1915), soaking up atmosphere, and taking courses at the Sorbonne. Upon his return to America, Eliot returned as well to Harvard, where he undertook graduate studies in philosophy and also served as a teaching assistant. Awarded a traveling fellowship for the 1914-1915 academic year, he intended to study in Germany, but the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 forced him to leave the country after only several weeks.
He made his way to London, England, which would become his home for the remaining fifty years of his life. There, on September 22, 1914, through his Harvard classmate and fellow poet, he met Ezra Pound, who would exert a great influence over the development of his work and his literary career. In the spring of the following year occurred a meeting that would have more momentous consequences for Eliot’s life, with Vivien Haigh-Wood, a vivacious young woman who intrigued him because of her difference from everything that he was accustomed to, and whom he married on June 26, 1915, after an acquaintance of two months.
The year 1915 also saw Eliot’s first major publication, when “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” appeared in the June issue of Poetry, at the insistence of Ezra Pound after several months of hesitation by Harriet Monroe, the magazine’s editor and founder. This poem was written with a faultless ear for rhythm and in striking images: one might claim, admittedly with some extravagance, that modern poetry begins with the third line of “Prufrock.” It combined Eliot’s own insecurity and intense self-consciousness, especially where women were concerned, with sharp descriptions of the elegant but superficial world of his years in Boston and Cambridge. Its eponymous narrator was as ruthless when looking inward as he was when observing the society through which he moved, almost like a phantom. It became the central piece of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Eliot’s slim first collection, which contained only twelve poems.
During these years, Eliot also did a good deal of book reviewing and public lecturing, largely for financial reasons. He taught school briefly in 1915 and 1916, then worked in Lloyds Bank for several years beginning in 1917. He would not achieve permanent, congenial, financially secure employment until he joined the publishing firm of Faber & Gwyer (later Faber & Faber) in 1925. The stress and exhaustion of his overwork–as well as the tensions of his marriage, which had been a difficult one for both partners from the beginning–brought him to a nervous collapse in 1921. During his recuperation at a sanitarium in Lausanne, Switzerland, he finished writing The Waste Land, a poem of more than four hundred lines. It was published in 1922, after Eliot adopted Pound’s recommendations and omitted much extraneous–and connective–material, and it immediately became the most famous and the most controversial example of the new poetry. Conservative critics denounced it as impenetrable and incoherent, because of its rapid shifts of setting and speaker, its allusions and quotations (in a number of languages), and especially its pages of notes provided by the author himself–although, in fairness to Eliot, it should be pointed out that the notes are for the most part citations of the works alluded to in the text and other bits of background information; they are not explanatory in nature. Readers of more advanced tastes responded at once to the poem’s depiction of a sordid society, empty of spiritual values, in the wake of World War I. Only gradually, in the light of Eliot’s subsequent development, did audiences come to fully appreciate the spiritual questing that informed the poem, and only after Eliot’s death, as the facts of his life began to be made public, did it become clear how autobiographically based were its descriptions of marital tension and its recoil from physical love. Eliot would finally separate from Vivien in 1933, and would go to great lengths thereafter to avoid personal contact with her; she was subsequently institutionalized, and died in a nursing home in 1947.
Through The Criterion, a journal that he founded in 1922 and edited until its suspension in 1939, and through his essays and volumes of literary and social criticism, Eliot came to exert immense influence as a molder of opinion. Despite his having written some of the most avant-garde poetry of his time, his basic conservatism became increasingly overt, as shown in his famous declaration in 1928, a year after he had become a British subject and had been confirmed in the Church of England, that he was a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion.” Religious themes became increasingly important to his poetry as well, from “Journey of the Magi” (1927) and other lyrics published in the Ariel series of pamphlets, through Ash-Wednesday (1930), to Murder in the Cathedral (1935), which dealt with the death of St. Thomas a Becket, and was the first of his several full-length verse dramas. Others included The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949), which became a remarkable popular success, estimated to have been seen by more than a million and a half people in Eliot’s lifetime. His last major work of nondramatic poetry was Four Quartets (1943), a gathering into one volume of four previously published long poems. Philosophical in temperament, this sequence concerned itself with issues of time and of spiritual renewal. To some, it represented the crown of Eliot’s creation; for others, it lacked the dynamic tension that had informed his earlier masterpieces. As with reactions to the Inferno and the Paradiso of his master Dante, preference for Eliot’s earlier or later poetry often seemed to be related to the religious belief, or lack thereof, of the individual reader. In any event, Four Quartets sufficiently consolidated Eliot’s reputation that in 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for literature.
In January 1957, Eliot married Valerie Fletcher, his secretary at Faber and Faber; Eliot in the last years of life enjoyed an emotional and physical closeness that he had never known before. Unfortunately, his happiness would be short-lived. After several years of declining health, he died of emphysema at his home in London on January 4, 1965, six days before his eighth wedding anniversary.,
