T.S. Eliot

In 1888, Thomas Stearns Eliot, also known as T.S. Eliot, was born in St. Louis, Missouri to Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Champe Stearns (T.S. Eliot: Biographical Timeline 1). He was the youngest of seven children and born when his parents were wealthy and secure, after recovering from a previous business failure. His grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had been a protйgй of William Ellery Channing, the dean of American Unitarianism. William Eliot graduated from Harvard Divinity School, and then moved toward the frontier. He founded the Unitarian church in St. Louis and became a strong backbone in the St. Louis society. As the city began to run down, the Eliot family remained while many of their colleagues moved to the suburbs (Bush 1). In St. Louis, from 1898 until 1906, he attended both Smith Academy and Milton Academy and wrote “Byronic” poems (Headings 13). At the age of twenty, Eliot found in the Harvard Union Library a book that would alter his life: Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which introduced him to the poetry lifestyle (Bush 2).

Eliot graduated from Harvard, and within two years, his poetic career was confirmed. For a short time he became the secretary of Harvard’s magazine, the Advocate, then moved to England. Here, Conrad Aiken, a friend, showed some of Eliot’s work to Ezra Pound who is not easily awed, and she loved his poetry. Eliot helped to modify poetic diction with Ezra Pound, whom was a critical element in the publishing of Eliot’s first works (Ackroyd 55).

In 1915, Eliot was introduced to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was instantly attracted, and married her that very same year (Ackroyd 61). His parents did not approve of this, especially once they discovered her history of emotional and physical difficulties (Ackroyd 62). This marriage nearly caused the family to crumble; yet, it did mark the beginning of Eliot’s English career. Since Vivienne did not wish to cross the Atlantic during a time of war, Eliot was forced to mark his literary home in England. They went to Bertrand Russell who shared his social resources and his London home. However, Russell and Vivienne became involved, and the relationship began to deteriorate. During which time, Eliot tried to support himself by teaching school, until he found a reliable place of employment in the foreign section of Lloyd’s Bank. This job gave him a sense of security that he needed to go back toward poetry, and he established an enormous inspiration with the publication of his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations. This book was financially supported by Ezra and Dorothy Pound (Bush 3).

Yet the years that Eliot was maturing as a literary writer were accompanied by many growing family uncertainties. Eliot's father died in January 1919, producing an outburst of guilt in the son who had hoped he would have time to resolve the bad feelings caused by his marriage and departure. At the same time Vivienne's emotional and physical health deteriorated and the financial and emotional part of her condition soared rapidly. After an extended visit in the summer of 1921 from his mother and sister Marion, Eliot suffered a nervous collapse and took a three month's rest cure (Bush 4).

Finally, Eliot broke through an extreme writer’s block that he incurred from the breakdown and much desired rest (Bush 4). This is when he completed the partially constructed poem: The Waste Land. This poem was known throughout the world and made Eliot also famous to the world. This work caught the mood of confusion after World War I, when everything in society seemed to be changing and many felt that pre-war morals and ethics were lost. The Waste Land is divided into five sections with monologues and historical quotations, and he also combined slang with scholarly language (T.S. Eliot 3).

In 1923, Vivienne nearly died, and Eliot came close to a second breakdown. The next two years were almost as bad, until a lucky chance allowed him to escape the stress of his job at the bank. Geoffrey Faber, of the new publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer, saw the advantages of Eliot's expertise in business and letters and recruited him as literary editor. At about the same time, Eliot reached out for religious support and turned to the Anglican church, finding his family’s Unitarian church unsatisfying. The reasons for this religious change are expressed in The Hollow Men (Bush 4).

Eliot spent much of the last half of his career writing a great deal of drama, and attempting to reach a larger and more diverse audience. As early as 1923, he had written parts of plays and even church pageants with choruses included. However, he soon realized that his poetic career would take him much farther than that of his theatrical (Bush 5). Starting around 1926, Eliot began presenting very prestigious lectures at Cambridge University and following with Harvard