Eliot, Thomas Stearns

(1888–1965)

   Poet.

   Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, and was educated at the Universities of Harvard, Oxford and the Sorbonne. After settling in England, he worked in a bank, edited the literary magazine The Criterion, and in 1925 he joined the board of the publishers Faber and Faber. Although he was agnostic as a young man (and this is reflected in his Lovesong of Alfred J. Prufrock (1917) and The Wasteland (1922)), he later converted to Anglo-Catholicism. Subsequently his work was strongly informed by his Christianity and his Ash Wednesday (1930), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Four Quartets (1944) are full of allusions to the works of St john of the cross, dante and the metaphysical poets. Besides poetry and plays, he also wrote several works of criticism. In his Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), he further expounded his religious and political beliefs which he had earlier defined as being those of a ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion’. Eliot is regarded as a leader in the Modernist movement and one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century.

   T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (1969);

   V. Eliot (ed.), The Letters of T.S. Eliot (1988);

   T.S. Eliot, Selected Prose, edited by F. Kermode (1975);

   G. Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T.S. Eliot, 2nd edn (1967).