![]() ![]() He distinguished himself with a remarkable first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), followed by Ara vos prec (1920) and The Sacred Wood (1922). His poems departed from the modish romantics to concentrate on the mystic outlook of the metaphysics and the Christian divines.įorever done with teaching and money handling, Eliot entered the book world for life as director of publisher Faber & Faber. Following brief teaching stints at High Wycombe and Highgate Junior School, from 1919 to 1922, he worked for Lloyds Bank and began submitting verse of subtle brilliance to magazines. As World War I engulfed Europe, health problems kept him out of the army.Īfter Eliot's father altered his will to underscore disappointment in his son's marriage, Ezra Pound influenced Eliot to remain in the British Isles and join the Bloomsbury Circle, a powerful intellectual force in England in the 1920s and 1930s. Eliot had traveled in Germany and begun a doctoral dissertation at Merton College, Oxford, when he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. To increase his fluency in French, he studied for a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, then returned to Harvard for doctoral work in philosophy. in philosophy and Sanskrit, all in four years. Heavily influenced by Irving Babbitt at Harvard, Eliot earned a B.A. After completing studies at Smith Academy and a year at Milton Academy, he turned his back on America and cultivated the air, grace, and mannerisms of a London dandy. ![]() His distinguished intellectual family derived from immigrants from East Coker, Somersetshire, a setting that Eliot returns to in his poetry. The seventh son of brick maker Henry Ware Eliot and poet and biographer Charlotte Stearns, Tom Eliot was born in St. It seems inconceivable that so British a poet could be an American Midwesterner. Both frustratingly obtuse and dazzlingly memorable, his masterworks redirect attention from the collapse of Edwardian respectability to the birth of modernism. His style transcended previous literary movements with a surprising sense of humor. His monumental verse, written during a period of emotional turmoil and personal re-evaluation, gave voice to the post-World War I trauma that left a generation in doubt about the future of civilization. Thomas Stearns Eliot, an American-born scholar, sophisticated eclectic, and poetic genius claimed by both the United States and England, is the twentieth century's touchstone author and critic.
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