Facts about T.S. Eliot
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Harvard University awarded T.S. Eliot a fellowship in 1914 to study philosophy at Oxford, where he remained for three years before relocating to London permanently.
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A 1965 recording of T.S. Eliot reading The Waste Land survives as the only known audio documentation of the poet performing his modernist masterpiece in his own voice.
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Eliot's 1919 essay The Metaphysical Poets established a critical framework that rehabilitated seventeenth-century poets like Donne and Marvell, fundamentally reshaping modernist literary canon formation.
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Faber and Faber published T.S. Eliot's works starting in 1925 and made him a director of the publishing house in 1929, positioning him as a major cultural gatekeeper for modernist literature.
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Prufrock and Other Observations, Eliot's 1917 debut collection containing The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, established him as a major modernist voice at age 28.
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Eliot's 1965 play The Elder Statesman marked his final dramatic work, concluding a theatrical career spanning three decades from Murder in the Cathedral.
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Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot's 1935 verse drama about the assassination of Thomas Becket, became his most frequently performed stage work and won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.
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Vivien Haigh-Wood, T.S. Eliot's first wife married in 1915, suffered severe mental illness throughout their 32-year marriage, deeply influencing the psychological anguish expressed in his poetry.
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At age 25, T.S. Eliot earned a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard University after completing his dissertation on F.H. Bradley's metaphysics in 1916.
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Nobel Prize in Literature went to T.S. Eliot in 1948 for his outstanding contributions to modern poetry and drama.
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T.S. Eliot served as editor of The Criterion literary magazine from 1922 to 1939, publishing influential modernist works alongside his own poetry and critical essays.
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Lloyds Bank employed T.S. Eliot from 1917 to 1925, during which he wrote some of his most celebrated modernist poetry while working as a foreign exchange clerk.
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Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot's final major work completed in 1943, comprises four interconnected long poems exploring time, memory, and spiritual redemption.
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British citizenship and a 1927 conversion to Anglicanism marked T.S. Eliot's formal embrace of English identity after spending formative years in St. Louis, Missouri.
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In 1922, T.S. Eliot published The Waste Land, a 434-line modernist poem that revolutionized twentieth-century English literature.