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T.S. Eliot, alongside William Butler Yeats, is regarded as one of the greatest English-language poets of the 20th century and was undoubtedly the most influential. Born Thomas Stearns Eliot on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, he came from a respectable middle-class family with New England roots, spending summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It was expected that he would attend Harvard—his cousin, Charles William Eliot, had been Harvard's 24th president, transforming it into a prominent research university during his 40-year tenure. After graduating from Milton Academy in 1906, Eliot went to Cambridge, England. (His cousin Charles was president during Thomas’s first three years there.)
Though passionate about literature, Eliot studied philosophy at Harvard under George Santayana, William James, and Bertrand Russell, who was then a visiting professor. He completed his undergraduate degree in three years instead of four and stayed on as a teaching assistant for another year. He then spent a year studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before returning to Harvard in 1911 to pursue a PhD.
Eliot planned to study at the University of Marburg in Germany during 1914-15, but the outbreak of World War I disrupted these plans. Instead, he won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, which proved pivotal by placing him near London. There, he met Ezra Pound, Il miglior fabbro ("the better craftsman," the dedication Eliot gave Pound on the title page of "The Waste Land"), who supported him and introduced him to key literary contacts. Although Eliot completed his doctoral dissertation, he never returned to Harvard to defend it and thus never received his PhD.
Growing disillusioned with academia, Eliot supported himself by working at a bank while establishing his literary career. Later, he became an editor at Faber and Faber in London. Deeply fond of England, he lived there for the rest of his life, becoming a British citizen in 1927. A staunch conservative, he admired England’s rigid class structures. Rejecting his family’s Unitarianism, he embraced Anglo-Catholicism within the Church of England. Time Magazine’s 1936 review of his "Collected Poems" described him as a "Royalist, Classicist, Anglo-Catholic."
Eliot’s first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915—partly motivated by his desire for English residency—was troubled. Vivienne’s biographer, Carole Seymour-Jones, suggests that Eliot’s possible concealed homosexuality contributed to their difficulties, alongside Vivienne’s mental health issues and poor health. Eliot eventually institutionalized her. He himself struggled with mental health, suffering a breakdown in 1921 and receiving treatment at a Swiss sanitarium.
The brilliant but emotionally troubled poet, whom The New York Times called "the poet of gray melancholy" in his obituary, produced some of English literature’s greatest works, beginning with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (written in America and published in 1915), followed by "Gerontion" (1920), "The Waste Land" (1922), and "The Hollow Men" (1925). "The Waste Land" marked a turning point in literary modernism, revolutionizing Anglo-American letters.
In addition to poetry, Eliot was an accomplished playwright, best known for "Murder in the Cathedral" (1935), "The Family Reunion" (1935), and "The Cocktail Party" (1949). He won a Tony Award for Best Play when "The Cocktail Party" premiered on Broadway in 1950. Thirty-three years later, Eliot posthumously received two more Tony Awards for "Cats," recognized for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score as lyricist. Based on his whimsical poems in "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats," the musical "Cats" became Broadway’s longest-running show, with 7,485 performances during its 18-year run ending in 2000. (Its record was later surpassed by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s "The Phantom of the Opera.")
Eliot was also active as an essayist and writer of belles-lettres. While his literary essays remain valuable, his writings on the human condition are often criticized for their illiberal perspective. When awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, the Swedish Academy praised him "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."
Vivienne died in 1947. A decade later, at age 68, Eliot married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 36 years his junior. Esmé, his secretary at Faber and Faber since 1949, survived him when he died on January 4, 1965, at age 76.
