Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns)

US-born poet, playwright, and critic, who lived in England from 1915. His first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), introduced new verse forms and rhythms; subsequent major poems were The Waste Land (1922), a long symbolic poem of disillusionment, and The Hollow Men (1925). For children he published Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939). Eliot's plays include Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1950). His critical works include The Sacred Wood (1920), setting out his views on poetic tradition. He makes considerable demands on his readers, and is regarded as the founder of modernism in poetry. As a critic he profoundly influenced the ways in which literature was appreciated. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, and was educated at Harvard, Massachusetts; the Sorbonne, Paris, France; and Oxford University, UK. He married and settled in London in 1917 and became a UK citizen in 1927, joining the Anglo-Catholic movement within the Church of England the same year. He was for a time a bank clerk, later lecturing and entering publishing at Faber and Faber, where he became a director. As editor of the highly influential literary magazine Criterion from 1922 to 1939, he was responsible for a critical re-evaluation of metaphysical poetry and Jacobean drama, and wrote perceptively about such European poets as Dante Alighieri, Charles Baudelaire, and Jules Laforgue.