St. Louis modernist who became a British subject
T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) remade English modernist poetry with bleak diction and fractured verse, winning the 1948 Nobel Prize. Born to St. Louis Boston Brahmins, he moved to England in 1914, took British subjecthood in 1927, and renounced U.S. citizenship—after Prufrock shocked 1915 readers and The Waste Land defined 1922.
Ash Wednesday (1930), The Hollow Men (1925), and Four Quartets (1943) extended the arc; seven plays added stage craft. His grandfather William Greenleaf Eliot had moved to St. Louis to found a Unitarian church, and his father, Henry Ware Eliot, headed the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company.
A congenital double hernia kept the boy from sports, so he retreated into books. At Smith Academy in St. Louis from 1898 to 1905 he studied Greek, Latin, French and German, and he began writing poems at fourteen after reading FitzGerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. A preparatory year at Milton Academy introduced him to Scofield Thayer, who would later publish The Waste Land.
Harvard gave him a bachelor's degree in 1909, after which he spent 1910 to 1911 in Paris hearing Henri Bergson lecture, then returned to Harvard to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit. He finished a doctoral dissertation on the philosopher F. H. Bradley in 1916 but never went back to defend it. Oxford bored him, and he gravitated to London, where he married Vivienne, a union that proved deeply unhappy amid her chronic illnesses; the couple later became the subject of the play Tom & Viv, filmed in 1994. In his sixties he admitted privately that he had talked himself into loving her partly to commit himself to staying in England.
Money was tight at first. He taught French and Latin at Highgate School, where John Betjeman was among his pupils, then at the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, while writing reviews and giving evening lectures on the side. After a spell at Lloyds Bank, a recommendation from Charles Whibley to Geoffrey Faber led him in 1925 to a directorship at the publisher Faber and Gwyer, later Faber & Faber, where he stayed for the rest of his career and brought out poets including W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender.
Source: T. S. Eliot
