Our Poet of the Month
May
T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in Missouri. He lived in St. Louis during the first eighteen years of his life and attended Harvard University. He left United States in 1910, after having earned both undergraduate and masters degrees and he also contributed several poems to the Harvard Advocate. He was living in England in 1915, when he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood and began working in London as a teacher, then at Lloyd's Bank. When he lived in London, Ezra Pound influenced him and he assisted in the publication of T.S.'s work in a number of magazines. When his poem The Waste Land was published in 1922, his reputations began to grow to nearly mythic proportions, and by 1930 and the next 30 years, he was considered the most dominant figure in poetry and literary criticism in the English-speaking world. He was associated with the publishing house of Faber & Faber where he published many younger poets, and eventually became the director of the firm. He separated from his first wife in 1933, and married Valerie Fletcher in 1956. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, and died in London in 1965.


Poetry

Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917 Poems, 1919
The Waste Land, 1922
Poems, 1909-1925, 1925
Ash Wednesday, 1930
East Coker, 1940
Burnt Norton, 1941
The Dry Salvages, 1941
Four Quartets, 1943
The Complete Poems and Plays, 1952
Collected Poems, 1962

Prose

The Sacred Wood, 1920
Andrew Marvell, 1922
For Lancelot Andrews, 1928
Dante, 1929
Tradition and Experimentation in Present-Day Literature, 1929
John Dryden, 1932
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933
After Strange Gods, 1933
Elizabethan Essays, 1934
Essays Ancient and Modern, 1936
Poetry and Drama, 1951
The Three Voices of Poetry, 1954
Religious Drama: Mediaeval and Modern, 1954

Plays

Sweeney Agonistes, 1932
The Rock, 1934
Murder in the Cathedral, 1935
The Family Reunion, 1939
The Cocktail Party, 1950