Eliot Dies: Modern Poetry Loses Its Architect

T.S. Eliot died on January 4, 1965, in London, at seventy-six. He was born Thomas Stearns Eliot in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888, and became the most influential poet of the twentieth century while simultaneously becoming the most English of Americans. He studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford before settling in London in 1914, working first as a schoolteacher and then at Lloyd's Bank while writing the poetry that would change the English language. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," published in 1915, introduced a speaking voice that measured out its life in coffee spoons and dared to ask: "Do I dare disturb the universe?" The Waste Land followed in 1922, a fragmented symphony of allusion and despair that Ezra Pound edited from a sprawling draft into 434 lines of modernist scripture. The poem demanded more of its readers than any previous work of English poetry, and it rewarded the effort. He took British citizenship in 1927 and spent the following decades as the dominant figure in English letters, editing The Criterion, running Faber and Faber's poetry list, and producing the Four Quartets, meditations on time and eternity that many consider his finest achievement. His first marriage, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was catastrophically unhappy and ended with her institutionalization. His second marriage to Valerie Fletcher in 1957 was by all accounts deeply happy. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 and the Order of Merit the same day. He wrote Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats as light verse for his godchildren. Andrew Lloyd Webber adapted it into the musical Cats, one of Broadway's longest-running shows, proving that high modernism and mainstream entertainment could share the same source material.