Thomas Stearns Eliot was a seminal British and American modernist poet, critic, and playwright. The seventh child of a monied and Brahmin New England family, Eliot was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. He graduated from Harvard University in 1909 with a bachelor’s degree in English and philosophy. Eliot had previously written short stories but took up poetry in earnest at Harvard. His themes from 1910 onwards began to align with those of the European modernist movement, rejecting Victorian notions of optimism and progress and taking instead a fundamentally negative view of the cosmopolis, the citizen, and the human condition. It was at Harvard that Eliot was introduced to influential writers like Irving Babbitt and George Santayana. Many of the artists, writers, and figures that Eliot studied at Harvard, like Charles Baudelaire and Dante Alighieri, would become important reference points in Eliot’s future work.
On Santayana’s advice, Eliot went to Paris for a year at the Sorbonne after graduation, and after a brief stint in philosophy at Harvard, he made a home for himself in 1914 in London. He wasn’t yet able to support himself writing full-time, and found employment as a teacher, a bank clerk, and as a magazine editor, careers which only served to further his disillusionment with the contemporary literary and press scene.
Fellow poet Conrad Aiken showed Eliot’s work to American expatriate and modernist progenitor Ezra Pound in 1914, and that September, Pound and Eliot first met, forming one of the most influential literary friendships of the early twentieth century. With Pound’s help, by 1915 Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, generally considered to be his first real poetic thesis, was published in Poetry magazine. By 1917, a debut book of poetry followed, and by 1922, Pound’s masterpiece, “The Waste Land”, instantly secured his place at the forefront of the European modernist avant-garde.
In 1927, Eliot converted to Anglicanism, and became a full British citizen. Like many of his friends, Eliot turned politically and socially conservative as he grew older, and by 1930 he had begun to espouse right-wing views, even investigating fascism as a philosophy, although unlike Pound, he ultimately rejected it. He died in 1965 in London.
Eliot believed in the infinite complexity of modern civilization, and was committed to representing this through verse, describing his work in 1928 as “Classicist in literature, Royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Few men could have claimed to have been more educated than Eliot—if by education we mean an upper-class Classical one—and his search in that vein for higher meaning in life, as influenced by his religious upbringing and conversion to the Church of England as well as his profound understanding of Classical literature and art, stood out in stark comparison to the greed, violence, and chaotic upheaval of the early twentieth century in which he came of age. The impossibility of Classical ‘high beauty’ in a world Eliot perceived to be fundamentally twisted is integral to understanding the dark and bitter tone Eliot expresses throughout his poetry: as he put it, “the juxtaposition of the matter of fact and the fantastic.”
Beyond his profound impact on the literary and cultural scene, Eliot was greatly lauded by many institutions, receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature and the British Order of Merit in 1948, as well as a 1950 Tony award for playwriting. For a poet of such fame, he produced relatively few works, a fact which he admitted, but what he lacked in quantity he made up with in quality. “The Waste Land” is still considered by many to be one of the defining works of the twentieth century:
“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish ? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images.”