T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888 and died in London in 1965. He studied at Harvard and then settled in England in 1914, where he worked as a teacher, a bank clerk and later a publisher, and became a British subject in 1927. He is regarded as one of the central poets of the twentieth century. His early poems, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and above all The Waste Land (1922), gave voice to the doubt and fragmentation felt in the years after the First World War. Later work, especially Four Quartets, turned toward faith and the nature of time. He also wrote verse plays and influential essays and criticism, and edited the journal The Criterion. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. His compressed, allusive style changed how poetry was written and read in English.