Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in Missouri, America in 1888. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended firstly St. Louis school and then Harvard University where he edited the literary review – “Harvard Advocate”. In 1910, he left the United States for Sorbonne, and in 1914 he went to Oxford, where he wrote his doctoral thesis.
It was in London that Eliot made friends with his contemporary Ezra Pound, who recognized his poetic genius at once, and assisted in the publication of his work in some popular magazines, most notably "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in Poetry in 1915. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917, and immediately established him as a leading poet of the modern times. The poem shows Eliot’s way of writing – he uses images, fragments to build up a broad picture of the character, his anxieties and his time. With the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, now considered by many to be the most influential poetic work of the twentieth century, Eliot's reputation began to grow, because the image of the wasteland was considered as the most common images of those times. So, for the next thirty years, he was the main figure in poetry and literature in English-speaking world.
Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature; it was for his best poem “Four quartets”. His major later poems include Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot was also an important playwright, whose verse dramas include Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party.

Anna Makhmudova