Prufrock and Other Observations

About T. S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) was a British poet of American descent. Born in St. Louis Missouri to a prominent family from Boston Eliot was raised in a religious and intellectual household. Childhood ailments left Eliot isolated for much of his youth encouraging his interest in literature. At the age of ten he entered a preparatory school where he studied Latin Ancient Greek French and German. During this time he also began writing poetry. From 1906 to 1909 he studied at Harvard University earning a Master of Arts in English literature and introducing himself to the poetry of the French Symbolists. Over the next several years he studied Indian philosophy and Sanskrit at the Harvard Graduate School before attending Oxford on a scholarship to Merton College. Tiring of academic life however he abandoned his studies and moved to London where he met the poet Ezra Pound. With Pounds encouragement and editing Eliot published such poems as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) and The Waste Land (1922) works that earned him a reputation as one of the twentieth centurys leading poets and a major figure in literary Modernism. Living in England with his wife Viviennefrom whom he would separate in 1932Eliot worked as a prominent publisher for Faber and Faber working with such poets as W.H. Auden and Ted Hughes. He converted to Anglicanism in 1927 an event that inspired his poem Ash-Wednesday (1930) and led to the composition of his masterpiece Four Quartets (1943). Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.