Biography of T.S. Eliot
Biography of T.S. Eliot
Through the centuries, decades, and years the world has come by many amazing authors and poets but there are always that select renowned few that will stick out in your memory, one of which being Thomas Stearns Eliot. As you read on you will be taken through the journey of T.S. Eliot’s amazing and intriguing life, and his works of poetry. His authoritative prose style he developed in his 20’s helped him re-establish the premises upon which poetry was read, evaluated, and written. In writing strange and impersonal seeming poems written out of his own personal torments, he helped redirect the course of twentieth-century poetry in English. Proving to be such a pivotal part in literary history T.S. Eliot has without a doubt gained his spot in literature, being a poet, playwright, literary critic, a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and a leader of the modernist movement in literature.
T.S. Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. He was the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot, a brick manufacturer, and Charlotte Stearns Eliot, who herself was a poet. Both parents’ families had emigrated from England to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. The poet’s paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot had moved to St. Louis in the 1830’s where he became a Unitarian Minister but he still kept a very close New England connection.
As a young boy T.S. Eliot attended Miss Locke’s Primary School and Smith Academy Record, graduating high school in 1905. He spent the year following his graduation at Milton academy, a private prep school in Massachusetts. In late September 1906 he began to study at Harvard University. There he took classes from professors such as Paul Elmer More and Irving Abbott, who both would later become Eliot’s main influence in his writing career. They will both influence Eliot through his classicism and emphasis on tradition. Also Eliot studied the poetry of Dante, who would soon be Eliot’s prime source of inspiration and enthusiasm.
In 1909, Eliot earned a B.A. at Harvard, and stayed to earn a master’s degree in English literature. Leaving in the beginning of the fall in the following year, Eliot went off to Paris to spend a year taking courses at the Sorbonne, writing, reading, and mostly soaking up the atmosphere. ...