September 26, 1888: T.S. Eliot is born.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis to the old and distinguished Eliot family of Boston. Later in his life, Eliot listed his birthplace and native state as factors that helped bring about his childhood fascination with literature, saying “it is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done… I feel that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not.” Despite the profound influence St. Louis had on him as a reader and author, Eliot moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and remained there, eventually becoming a naturalized British subject and an Anglican.
Eliot’s career as a poet arguably began with the publication of his very loaded (a “drama of literary anguish”) stream of consciousness poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, which he began writing in 1910 and completed in 1915. His oft-quoted poem The Waste Land was published in 1922. Other famous works published during his career (which spanned several decades) include The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets (after which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature). Later in his career Eliot focused much of his effort on plays rather than pure poetry. He was also a prominent and influential literary critic.
While he is regarded as one of the most important English-language poets of the century, his reputation slipped after World War II, and it slipped even further after his death in 1965. To his critics, Eliot’s poetry was unnecessarily complex, even incomprehensible, and lacking any real structure. To his admirers, it was refreshingly experimental, and even some of his critics had to acknowledge his mastery of the language.