T. S. Eliot Born: Modernism's Defining Poet

T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888, studied at Harvard, and moved to England in 1914, never really moving back. He worked at Lloyd's Bank for nine years while writing the poetry that would transform English literature. The Waste Land appeared in 1922, after Ezra Pound had edited the manuscript down from a sprawling draft to 433 lines of fragmented voices, multiple languages, and no conventional narrative. The poem's footnotes raised more questions than they answered, and nobody quite knew what to make of it. It became the defining poem of literary modernism anyway. Eliot followed it with "The Hollow Men" and "Ash Wednesday," works that traced his spiritual journey from despair to Anglo-Catholic faith. He took British citizenship in 1927 and described himself as "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion," a provocation aimed at the liberal literary establishment that admired his work but not his conclusions. He won the Nobel Prize in 1948 and was awarded the Order of Merit by King George VI the same day, making him the most honored literary figure in the English-speaking world. His first marriage, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, was disastrous. She suffered from mental illness and was eventually committed to an institution, where she died in 1947. His second marriage, to Valerie Fletcher in 1957, was by all accounts happy and lasted until his death in 1965. He wrote Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats in 1939 as light verse for his godchildren. Andrew Lloyd Webber turned it into the musical Cats, one of the longest-running shows in Broadway history. Eliot would have hated the costumes.