T. S. Eliot essays

T. S. Eliot essays T.S. Eliot was an extremely private individual, leaving little behind for biographers. During his lifetime, Eliot earned a respected place in the literary world and his poetry is considered to be some of the most influential of the twentieth century. Born Thomas Stearns Eliot on September 26, 1988 to one of the most distinguished families of St. Louis, Missouri, Eliot was related to both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Adams (Pettingell pg). He spent the first eighteen years of his life in St. Louis and then attended Harvard University, earning both undergraduate and masters degrees, then in 1910 left the United States to study at the Sorbonne in Paris (T.S. pg). He then returned to Harvard and earned a doctorate in philosophy, then in 1914, Eliot returned to Europe and settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1927 (T.S. pg). He married Vivien Haigh-Wood the following year and began working as a teacher, the later for Lloyd's Bank in London (T.S. pg). While in London, Ezra Pound took notice of Eliot, recognizing at once his poetic genius and became a great influence in Eliot's life (T.S. pg). Pound assisted Eliot in the publication of his work in a several magazines and most notably, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' in 1915 (T.S. pg). In 1917, Eliot's first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations,' was published and instantly established him as a leading poet of the avant-garde (T.S. pg). In 1922 when The Waste Land' was published, his reputation grew to mythic proportions and by 1930 and for the next three decades, Eliot was the "most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English speaking world" (T.S. pg). His poetry transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the 17th century, such as John Donne, and the 19th century French symbolist poets, Baudelaire and Laforgue, "into radical innovations in poe...