SUMMARY: T. S. Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) American poet, dramatist, literary critic.
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Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, to an old and prominent New England family. His father, Henry Ware Eliot was a successful businessman, who was president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis; his mother, who was born Charlotte Champe Stearns wrote poems and was also a social worker. Eliot was the last of his parents six surviving children; his parents were both 44 years old when he was born.

He went on to become a poet, dramist and literary critic. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. It was during his years at Harvard that his poems were first published. He also spent an influential year in Paris at the Sorbonne and much of this time influenced his later writings. He went on to settle in England in 1914 at the age of 25. While there he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually a literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber. He later became a director there. He founded Criterion which became an exclusive and influential literary journal during the seventeen years of its publication (1922-1939). In 1927, at the age of 39 Eliot decided to become a British citizen and about the same time he entered the Anglican Church. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948

While in England he was introduced to Cambridge governess Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Eliot was not happy studying at Merton and declined a second year there. Instead on June 26, 1915, he married Vivienne in a register office. After a short visit, without his new wife, to the U. S. to see his family, he returned to London and took a few teaching jobs such as lecturing at Birkbeck College, University of London. He continued to work on his dissertation and in 1916, sent it to Harvard, which accepted it. Yet because he did not appear in person to defend his dissertation, however, he was not awarded his PhD.

His marriage to Vivienne was not a happy one and by 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. When Harvard University offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932-1933 academic year, he quickly accepted, leaving Vivien in England. When he returned in 1933, Eliot officially separated from Vivienne. He managed to avoid all but one meeting with his wife between his leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947. Vivienne died at Northumberland House, a mental hospital north of London, after she was committed in 1938.

Eliot’s second marriage was short but much happier. He married Esme Valerie Fletcher on January 10, 1957. In sharp contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Miss Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary since August 1949. The wedding was kept a secret to preserve his privacy. The ceremony was held in a church at 6:15 a.m. with virtually no one other than his wife’s parents in attendance. Valerie was 37 years younger than her famous husband. After Eliot’s death she dedicated her time to preserving his legacy.

Eliot is considered to be one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. He followed his belief that poetry should aim at a representation of the complexities of modern civilization in language and that such a representation necessarily leads to difficult poetry. Despite this difficulty in his writing his influence on modern poetic diction has been immense.

T.S. Eliot died on January 4, 1965 of emphysema in London. He had suffered with health problems for many years owing to the combination of London air and his heavy smoking, and was often being laid low with bronchitis or tachycardia. His body was then cremated and, according to Eliot’s wishes, the ashes were then taken to St Michael’s Church in East Coker, the village from which Eliot’s ancestors emigrated to America. There only a simple plaque commemorates him.

A list of T.S. Eliot works include:

• Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
• Preludes (1917)
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
• Poems (1920)
• Gerontion
• Sweeney Among the Nightingales
• The Waste Land (1922)
• The Hollow Men (1925)
• Ariel Poems (1927-1954)
• The Journey of the Magi (1927)
• Ash Wednesday (1930)
• Coriolan (1931)
• Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939)

Plays
• Sweeney Agonistes (published in 1926, first performed in 1934)
• The Rock (1934)
• Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
• The Family Reunion (1939)
• The Cocktail Party (1949)
• The Confidential Clerk (1953)
• The Elder Statesman (first performed in 1958, published in 1959)

Nonfiction
• The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920)
• The Second-Order Mind (1920)
• “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1920)
• Homage to John Dryden (1924)
• Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1928)
• For Lancelot Andrewes (1928)
• Dante (1929)
• Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (1932)
• The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
• After Strange Gods (1934)
• Elizabethan Essays (1934)
• Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)
• The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)
• Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948)
• Poetry and Drama (1951)
• The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)
• “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956)
• On Poetry and Poets (1957)

Posthumous publications
• To Criticize the Critic (1965)
• The Waste Land: Facsimile Edition (1974)
• Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 1996