3. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 to a
family with prominent New England heritage. Eliot
largely abandoned his Midwestern roots and chose to
ally himself with both New and Old England throughout
his life. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate in
1906, was accepted into the literary circles, and had a
predilection for 16th- and 17th-century poetry, the Italian
Renaissance (particularly Dante), Eastern religion, and
philosophy. Perhaps the greatest influences on him,
however, were 19th-century French Symbolists such as
Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephene Mallarme,
and especially Jules Laforgue. Eliot took from them a
sensual yet precise attention to symbolic images, a
feature that would be the hallmark of his brand of
Modernism.
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4. Eliot also earned a master's degree from
Harvard in 1910 before studying in Paris and
Germany. He settled in England in 1914 at the
outbreak of World War I, studying at Oxford,
teaching, and working at a bank. In 1915 he
married British writer Vivienne Haigh-Wood
(they would divorce in 1933), a woman prone to
poor physical and mental health; in November
of 1921, Eliot had a nervous breakdown.
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5. By 1917 Eliot had already achieved great
success with his first book of poems,Prufrock
and Other Observations, which included "The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a work begun
in his days at Harvard. Eliot's reputation was
bolstered by the admiration and aid of
esteemed contemporary poet Ezra Pound, the
other tower of Modernist poetry. During Eliot's
recuperation from his breakdown in a Swiss
sanitarium, he wrote "The Waste Land,"
arguably the most influential English-language
poem ever written.
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6. Eliot founded the quarterly Criterion in 1922, editing it
until its end in 1939. He was now the voice of Modernism,
and in London he expanded the breadth of his writing.
In addition to writing poetry and editing it for various
publications, he wrote philosophical reviews and a
number of critical essays. Many of these, such as
"Tradition and the Individual Talent," have become
classics, smartly and affectionately dissecting other
poets while subliminally informing the reader about
Eliot's own work. Eliot declared his preference for poetry
that does away with the poet's own personality and
uses the "objective correlative" of symbolic, meaningful,
and often chaotic concrete imagery.
Eliot joined the Church of England in 1927 and his
subsequent work reflects his Anglican attitudes.
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7. The six-part poem "Ash Wednesday"
(1930) and other religious works in the
early part of the 1930s, while notable in
their own right, retrospectively feel like
a warm-up for his epic "Four Quartets"
(completed and published together in
1943). Eliot used his wit, philosophical
preoccupation with time, and vocal
range to examine further religious
issues.
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8. Eliot wrote his first play, "Murder in the Cathedral," in
1935. A verse drama about the murder of Archbishop
Thomas Becket, the play's religious themes were
forerunners of Eliot's four other major plays, "The
Family Reunion" (1939), "The Cocktail Party" (1949), "The
Confidential Clerk" (1953), and "The Elder Statesman"
(1959). With these religious verse dramas cloaked in
secular conversational comedy, Eliot belied whatever
pretensions his detractors may have found in his
Anglophilia. He wrote "Old Possum's Book of Practical
Cats" in 1939, a book of verse for children that was
eventually adapted into the Broadway musical "Cats."
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9. As one might expect from his work, Eliot was unhappy
for most of his life, but his second marriage in 1957
proved fruitful. When he died in 1965, he was the
recipient of a Nobel Prize (1948), the author of the
century's most influential poem, and arguably the
century's most important poet. Perhaps due to the large
shadow he casts, relatively few poets have tried to ape
his style; others simply find him cold. Still, no one can
escape the authority of Eliot's Modernism - it is as
relevant today as it was in 1922. While Eliot may not
have as much influence on poets today as some of his
contemporaries, the magnitude of his impact on poetry
is unrivaled.
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