46 Facts About TS Eliot

Thomas Stearns TS Eliot was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor.

TS Eliot became a British citizen in 1927 at the age of 39, subsequently renouncing his American citizenship.

TS Eliot was known for seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party .

TS Eliot was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".

TS Eliot's father, Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St Louis.

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TS Eliot's mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, who wrote poetry, was a social worker, which was a new profession in the U S in the early 20th century.

From 1898 to 1905, TS Eliot attended Smith Academy, the boys college preparatory division of Washington University, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German.

TS Eliot said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them.

TS Eliot's first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905.

TS Eliot lived in St Louis, Missouri for the first 16 years of his life at the house on Locust Street where he was born.

TS Eliot studied at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning a Bachelor of Arts in an elective program similar to comparative literature in 1909 and a Master of Arts in English literature the following year.

TS Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1914.

TS Eliot first visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer programme, but when the First World War broke out he went to Oxford instead.

TS Eliot exchanged letters with her from Oxford during 1914 and 1915, but they did not meet again until 1927.

When told via a phone call from the asylum that Vivienne had died unexpectedly during the night, TS Eliot is said to have buried his face in his hands and cried out 'Oh God, oh God.

In 1925 TS Eliot left Lloyds to become a director in the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, where he remained for the rest of his career.

On 29 June 1927, TS Eliot converted from Unitarianism to Anglicanism, and in November that year he took British citizenship, thereby renouncing his United States citizenship in the event he had not officially done so previously.

TS Eliot became a churchwarden of his parish church, St Stephen's, Gloucester Road, London, and a life member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr.

About 30 years later TS Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament".

TS Eliot had wider spiritual interests, commenting that "I see the path of progress for modern man in his occupation with his own self, with his inner being" and citing Goethe and Rudolf Steiner as exemplars of such a direction.

From 1933 to 1946 TS Eliot had a close emotional relationship with Emily Hale.

TS Eliot later destroyed Hale's letters to him, but Hale donated TS Eliot's to Princeton University Library where they were sealed until 2020.

When TS Eliot heard of the donation he deposited his own account of their relationship with Harvard University to be opened whenever the Princeton letters were.

In contrast to his first marriage, TS Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August 1949.

TS Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium.

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In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, TS Eliot was commemorated by the placement of a large stone in the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey.

Typically, TS Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small books or pamphlets and then collected them in books.

Cleo McNelly Kearns notes in her biography that TS Eliot was deeply influenced by Indic traditions, notably the Upanishads.

Poem's structure was heavily influenced by TS Eliot's extensive reading of Dante and refers to a number of literary works, including Hamlet and those of the French Symbolists.

TS Eliot's style became less ironic, and the poems were no longer populated by multiple characters in dialogue.

Edwin Muir maintained that it is one of the most moving poems TS Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect", though it was not well received by everyone.

In 1939, TS Eliot published a book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.

TS Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that most of all led him to being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

TS Eliot was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in The Waste Land.

Pageant play by TS Eliot called The Rock was performed in 1934 for the benefit of churches in the Diocese of London.

Much of it was a collaborative effort; TS Eliot accepted credit only for the authorship of one scene and the choruses.

TS Eliot wrote The Cocktail Party while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study.

TS Eliot made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism, and strongly influenced the school of New Criticism.

TS Eliot was somewhat self-deprecating and minimising of his work and once said his criticism was merely a "by-product" of his "private poetry-workshop".

TS Eliot is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind.

TS Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poem The Waste Land.

TS Eliot's essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets.

TS Eliot particularly praised the metaphysical poets' ability to show experience as both psychological and sensual, while at the same time infusing this portrayal with—in TS Eliot's view—wit and uniqueness.

TS Eliot had argued that a poet must write "programmatic criticism", that is, a poet should write to advance his own interests rather than to advance "historical scholarship".

For instance, though Ransom negatively criticised The Waste Land for its "extreme disconnection", Ransom was not completely condemnatory of TS Eliot's work and admitted that TS Eliot was a talented poet.

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Bush notes that TS Eliot's reputation "slipped" significantly further after his death.