Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888 - 1965)

Poet, playwright, literary critic and editor, T. S. Eliot is one of the leading voices of the modernist movement.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on Sept. 26, 1888, Eliot studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne and at Oxford University.
In 1915, he settled in London, where he was employed as teacher, bank clerk and assistant editor. During the same year, he published his first distinguished piece, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which was followed by Gerontion (1919) - a meditative interior monologue in blank verse - and by. The Waste Land (1922).
Extremely disillusioned by the years following Word War I, Eliot, in The Waste Land, portrays moments of horror and pessimism and combines them to the desire of man for redemption. The sublime and original use of the language, the complex style and poignant topic have made The Waste Land one of the landmarks of modern poetry. In 1922, Eliot also founded the literary journal "Criterion", which he then edited for seventeen years. In 1927, he was confirmed in the Church of England and became a naturalised British citizen. A more traditional and deeply religious poem, Ash Wednesday, was published in 1930, whereas his Selected Essays appeared in 1932.
Before the publication of The Four Quartets (1943), Eliot wrote his first plays: The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) - a play dealing with the assassination of Archbishop Thomas a Becket - and The Family Reunion (1939). After World War II, other plays appeared, such as The Cocktail Party, based upon the ancient Greek drama Alcestis by Euripides (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954) and The Elder Statesman (1958).
In The Four Quartets (Burnt Norton, 1936; East Coker, 1940; The Dry Salvages, 1941; Little Gidding, 1942), Eliot dealt with the idea of past and human history. Although each poem was published individually, when they appeared together they made a great impact on the public and led Eliot to international fame and recognition. In 1948, the author was awarded the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Eliot was married twice. In 1947, his first wife died after a long illness; he married again in 1957. He died on Jan. 4, 1965, in London.