Eliot, Thomas Stearns
Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888–1965). Poet and critic. His religious background was Unitarian, which gave way to a despairing agnosticism which finds expression in his early poems and, especially, The Waste Land (1922). Many religious traditions appealed to him, including Hindu philosophy, Neo-Thomism, and the classical Anglicanism of Andrewes and the Metaphysical poets (though an anti-Semitic note is also evident), and in 1927 he was baptized and declared himself ‘an Anglo-Catholic in religion’. His later poems (especially Four Quartets, 1935–42) and his plays explore human doubt and scepticism within an intellectual framework, with deep traditional roots in the mystics, Dante, and the Greek tragedians: what is believed is more readily lived than expressed in words.
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Eliot, Thomas Stearns