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The Biography of T. S. Eliot

By Adam Antonio

St. Louis in Missouri was the birthplace of one of the best poets in the arena of English
literature i.e. T. S. Eliot. He was born there in 1888; after that, he moved to Boston which
was the home state of the Elliot. His grandfather had a Unitarian faith and that helped
him in establishing one of the best universities in the world i.e. Washington University in
St. Louis. Thomas Stearns Eliot was the youngest of seven children. There was a huge
gap between him and his parents because of the very old age just like grandparents, and
that resulted upon him the feeling of loneliness which was quite evident in his poems. As
an effect, he followed a different path from his ancestors’ path, so he moved to Milton
Academy in Massachusetts when he was a teenager, and after that to Harvard to attain the
bachelor’s degree in the comparative literature and an M.A. degree in the same field of
specialization and that was in 1910. Actually, that period was functioned for having
thinkers and professors in different fields concerning literature, psychology, religion, and
philosophy. Therefore, Eliot was such fortunate scholar for having the chance to meet
professors like George Lyman Kittredge, the great Chaucer and Shakespeare scholar, he
also met George Santayana, the philosopher was teaching , in addition to another
philosopher i.e. William James. Another person met Eliot and had a big effect upon Eliot
in terms of religious and philosophical thinking and that was Bertrand Russell.
Eliot once read a book titled “The Symbolist Movement in Literature” by Arthur
Symons, so its movement influenced Eliot’s early years. His passion for reading and
learning the Elizabethan drama and the Renaissance poets like Shakespeare and Dante
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had left its touch on his poems such as The Lovesong of Alfred Prufrock or Rhapsody on
a windy night. His interests in the Elizabethan dramatists extended to cover John
Webster, Christopher Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher and other playwrights. He
attained the bachelor degree in 1910. Then he had a chance to be sent to France as a
scholar and there he attended lectures of philosophy, and he was able to understand them
quite well. There, he had a friend, whose name is John Retinol; they lived together in
Paris and they formed a cultural friendship. Alongside with John, they visited many parts
of Europe. Although, their colleagues accused them of having a gay relationship, but still
an accusation. In fact, Eliot experienced the life with someone who can understand, and
help him in his works of arts, and sympathize with him.
He headed back to Harvard in 1911 to study philosophy there, and the cadre there liked
his active and unique understanding of philosophy after gaining his Ph.D. in philosophy,
and he could avail that to teach there. Our poet extended his studies to include religion,
and he studied some Sanskrit to learn about the Hindu religion. Go back to the Waste
Land, and you will find some lines of Sanskrit. Eliot got a scholarship to the homeland of
philosophers i.e. Germany. He visited Marburg where he liked to make his researches in
the summer of 1940.
He had to go back to London without completing his studies and that was with the
beginning fire of World War I. Back to Harvard, where he was introduced to others the
same as Ezra Pound who had a tremendous effect upon the English and American
literature. A matter of fact is that both of Eliot and Pound were revolutionist to change
the form of modern movement. William Butler Yeats, one of the oldest poets at that time,
was planted in the modern movement for Pound’s service, as Eliot assured. Ezra Pound
also helped Robert Frost when he was in England to become a successful poet in England
and in America when he went back. Pound made Eliot a favor by helping him in
publishing his first famous poem i.e. the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, after five years
of its written date, so the poem was published in a little magazine called Poetry
Magazine. Eliot wrote a collection of poems “Prufrock and Other Observations”
dedicated to that same soul mate of his back in Paris who died in the World War I. Eliot
talked about that incident in the first section of the Waste Land, when he said: April is the
cruelest month. After that tragic event, he needed to fill his life again, so he married a
young woman named Vivian Haig. He married her without informing his family and that
created a miserable habit in America. He loved the life of England, which was culturally
colorful more than America, that’s of course through dealing with Pound in London. he
stayed in England through most of world world one. There was a fear of submarine
warfare which kept certainly kept his wife there in England and I think kept T.S. Eliot
from voyaging back home for several years. Their marriage wasn’t successful, and there
were a lot of breakdowns. Eliot witnessed the last breakdown while he was writing the
Waste Land, and that event supported the poem, and he wrote to fill the cultural gap of
the western world. At that time, there was a great number of various changes in the
social, political, and religious structures of the society. He also got medical problems
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during the writing of the Waste Land. Later, he wrote a book of essays titled The Sacred
Wood, which he affected his readers to by modifying their cultural understanding.
He claimed to be “a royalist in politics, a classicist in literature. He then entered the
church of England, and became an Anglo Catholic person with vowing the celibacy.
Concerning his marriage, he wrote a poem titled Ash Wednesday, talking his marriage
experience in question of the Christian faith. He began his greatest work in the quartets in
the 1930s and completed in 1943. His wife died in 1948 at the age of 60.
Then he won the Nobel Prize. Eliot surprised everyone with his second marriage in 1957.
She was a young secretary, so he gave her papers and asked her to read them, and he
wrote there, will you marry me? And she agreed. Unlike the first marriage, it was a happy
marriage. Unfortunately, his health started to become weaker and weaker until he died in
January, 1965.