T. S. Eliot Biography Quotes 56 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, into a prominent New England family that had settled in the Midwest. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, worked in business, and his mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, wrote poetry and was active in social work. Eliot attended Smith Academy in St. Louis and spent formative summers in Massachusetts, absorbing a New England heritage that would remain central to his imagination. After a preparatory year in Massachusetts, he entered Harvard University in 1906, completing a bachelor's degree in 1909 and a master's in 1910. At Harvard he studied philosophy and literature, attending lectures by George Santayana and Josiah Royce, and developing an interest in the metaphysical poets and continental thought. Further study took him to the Sorbonne in Paris and, later, to Merton College, Oxford. He began a doctoral dissertation on the British idealist F. H. Bradley, work that refined his concern with epistemology and the limits of experience, though the doctorate was never completed.

Emergence as a Poet
While still a student, Eliot encountered the French symbolists, especially Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire, and renewed his devotion to Dante. Their voices helped shape his early poems, including Prufrock and Preludes, modern urban monologues that balanced irony with lyric intensity. In 1914 he settled in London, where he met Ezra Pound, who quickly recognized his talent, introduced him to a circle of writers, and promoted his work with tireless energy. Pound's editorial acuity and advocacy were decisive in launching Eliot's career and in sharpening his poetic method.

Work, Publication, and The Waste Land
Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915 and, during a period of financial strain, worked as a teacher and then as a clerk at Lloyds Bank in London. The routine provided stability while he established himself as a poet and critic. His first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared in 1917. Increasingly burdened by ill health and personal strain, he took a rest cure in 1921; out of that crisis emerged The Waste Land (1922), a fragmented, densely allusive poem that captured the spiritual dislocations of postwar Europe. Pound's editing compressed and intensified its architecture, and initial publication in The Criterion (which Eliot founded) and The Dial quickly made it a touchstone of literary modernism.

Critic, Editor, and Publisher
Eliot's authority rested as much on criticism as on poetry. Essays such as Tradition and the Individual Talent and The Metaphysical Poets advanced influential ideas about impersonality in art, the historical sense, and what he called the objective correlative. He founded and edited The Criterion from 1922 to 1939, shaping transatlantic debates about modern literature and culture. In 1925 he joined the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber, where, alongside Geoffrey Faber, he became an editor and director, nurturing poets and playwrights and helping to define British literary taste between the wars. In London he moved among figures such as Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf, whose Hogarth Press issued some of his work, and he engaged the achievements of James Joyce and W. B. Yeats with a discerning, sometimes stringent, critical eye.

Religious Turn and British Citizenship
In 1927 Eliot was received into the Church of England and became a British subject. This conversion signaled a turn toward explicitly religious and philosophical themes. Ash-Wednesday (1930) reflected a search for spiritual discipline, while Four Quartets, written across the late 1930s and early 1940s, meditated on time, suffering, and the possibility of redemption. Its sequences, including Burnt Norton and East Coker, fused lyric reflection with theological insight and became central to his mature reputation.

Drama and Public Voice
Seeking a public, communal art, Eliot turned to verse drama. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) staged the martyrdom of Thomas Becket and toured widely, demonstrating that poetic drama could command contemporary audiences. Subsequent plays such as The Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party explored guilt, identity, and spiritual renewal within modern social settings. His light-verse collection, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), written for friends and children, later inspired a celebrated stage musical, an unexpected testament to his range.

Personal Life and Associations
Eliot's first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood was troubled and contributed to periods of strain; they separated in the 1930s, and she died in 1947. In 1957 he married Valerie Fletcher, a colleague at Faber, and their companionship brought him late-life happiness. Through these years he maintained close ties with Ezra Pound, even when Pound's politics became contentious; he supported Pound's literary stature while keeping clear critical distance from Pound's views. Eliot also sustained friendships and professional relationships with editors, scholars, and younger writers who sought his guidance, reinforcing his role as an arbiter of letters.

Honors, Influence, and Controversy
In 1948 Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature and was appointed to the Order of Merit, honors that recognized both poetic achievement and critical authority. His essays and poems helped redefine modern poetic diction, integrating colloquial speech with learned reference, and his advocacy of the metaphysical poets reshaped the canon. At the same time, his work and some statements he made have been scrutinized for troubling representations, including antisemitic elements that readers and scholars have confronted and debated. The durability of his achievement lies partly in that ongoing critical engagement, as well as in the artistry of poems that continue to test the boundaries of tradition and innovation.

Final Years and Death
In the postwar decades Eliot remained a central figure at Faber and a prominent public intellectual, publishing lectures such as Notes Towards the Definition of Culture while revisiting earlier themes of belief, community, and literary value. He continued to read and lecture, appearing before audiences in Britain and abroad. Eliot died in London on January 4, 1965. His ashes were interred in England, and the words and places of Four Quartets, with their meditations on time and stillness, have often been read as a valediction to a career that began in the American Midwest and found its lasting home in British letters.

Our collection contains 56 quotes who is written by S. Eliot, under the main topics: Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Love.

Other people realated to S. Eliot: Virginia Woolf (Author), W. H. Auden (Poet), Edmund Wilson (Critic), Marianne Moore (Poet), Henry Reed (Poet), Djuna Barnes (Novelist), John Ford (Dramatist), Northrop Frye (Critic), Herbert Read (Poet), Irving Babbitt (Critic)