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Eliot's biography
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Birth
He was born in St. Louis, Missouri. -
Education - Harvard University
He entered Harvard University and was influenced by Irving Babbitt, George Santayana, anti-Romanticism, Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, the Italian Renaissance, and Indian mystical philosophy. -
Paris
After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris. -
Ezra Pound
Eliot met Ezra Pound who encouraged him to settle in England -
UK
Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom -
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
publication of his first successful poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." This work, together with the other short poems This work, together with the other short poems that were published along with it, profoundly altered the course of English literature. They were the first truly modernist works in English, although the most visible influences on their imagery and diction were not English but French. -
Fisrt marriage
He married an English writer named Vivienne Haigh-Wood. The marriage, unfortunately, was not a happy one. His wife was highly neurotic and constantly sick. This had a profound effect on Eliot, and by November 1921 he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. -
The Sacred Wood - Essays on Poetry and Criticism
In these essays, Eliot presented his new and exacting theory of the role of criticism, of the necessity for criticism if our literary culture is to survive. For Eliot, it is no accident that criticism and poetry so often come together in the same intelligence – as in his own case, and the case of Coleridge, whom he singled out as the finest of English critics. -
The Waste Land
The Waste Land deals with dark and haunting themes of individual consciousness and spiritual desolation against the decline of civilisation. -
Conversion to Anglicanism
Eliot was baptised and then received into the Church of England. The same year, completing his psychological transition to England, he dropped his American citizenship. He proclaimed himself "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion" -
Ash Wednesday
Ash Wednesday -
Eliot as a playwright
He also wrote many plays including The Rock: A Pageant Play (1934); Murder in the Cathedral (1935); The Family Reunion (1939); The Cocktail Party (1950); The Confidential Clerk (1954); and The Elder Statesman (1959). -
Nobel Prize
Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature -
Second marriage
He married his super-efficient secreterary, Valerie Fletcher, at St Barnabas church, Kensington, very early in the morning. Valerie had been his secretary at Faber and Faber. She was thirty years old and he was sixty eight. -
Death
Thomas Stearns Eliot died on 4 January 1965, his ashes interred at the Parish Church of Saint Michael in East Coker, Somerset, England from whence his ancestors came.
