Eliot, T. S.
Eliot, T. S. (1888–1965). Poet and man of letters. Born in St Louis, after Harvard he studied in Europe, in 1927 becoming a British citizen. With the encouragement of Ezra Pound he produced The Waste Land (1922), usually seen as a commentary on the western civilization which collapsed in the Great War, though he preferred to think of it as ‘a piece of rhythmical grumbling’. Equally innovative literary criticism helped create the taste by which he was admired, though in 1927 his confirmation in the Anglican church to many seemed an anachronism. For others, the religious poetry of Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943) is his most profound response to the times. Attempts to restore poetic drama to the West End stage had more mixed success, though Murder in the Cathedral (1935) has endured. By now very much an establishment figure, he found solace in a late second marriage happier than his first.
John Saunders
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Eliot, T. S.