T.S. Eliot Biographical Time Line
1888 September 26: Thomas Stearns Eliot born in St. Louis, Missouri to Henry Ware and Charlotte Stearns Eliot.
1898 A student at Smith Academy in St. Louis
1905 To Milton Academy in Massachusetts
1906-10 Undergraduate years at Harvard.
Reads Symons’s The Symbolist Movement in Literature and the poetry of Laforgue.
Studies with George Santayana and Irving Babbitt.
1910-11 Having finished BA and MA degrees at Harvard, spends a year at the Sorbonne in Paris.
In the summer of 1911, finishes a version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
1911-14 Returns to Harvard to study philosophy as a graduate student.
Begins doctoral thesis on F.H. Bradley.
1914 To England on fellowship; meets Ezra Pound.
1915 Marries Vivien Haigh-Wood on June 26th; begins publishing poems that later appear in the Prufrock volume.
1916 Eliot working as teacher at Highgate Junior School and as University Extension Lecturer.
1917 Prufrock and Other Observation published.
Eliot takes a position at Lloyds Bank in the Colonial and Foreign Department.
1919 Ara Vos Prec published, with "Gerontion" and the poems later published in Poems—1920.
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" appears in The Egoist.
1920 The Sacred Wood published.
1921 Ill and exhausted, Eliot takes leave from Lloyds Bank.
Recuperating at Margate and Lausanne, finishes the drafts of The Waste Land, which he then shows to Pound.
1922 The Waste Land published. First issue of Criterion appears.
1925 Poems 1909-1925 published (with "The Hollow Men").
Eliot joins the publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, leaves Lloyds bank.
1927 Enters the Church of England and assumes British citizenship
1928 For Lancelot Andrewes published.
1930 Ash-Wednesday published.
1932 Selected Essays 1917-1932
1933 Eliot’s 1932-33 Norton lectures at Harvard published
under the title The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933).
At the University of Virginia, he delivers the lectures later published as
After Strange Gods (1934). Obtains legal separation from Vivien.
1934 The Rock: A Pageant Play performed and published.
1935 Murder in the Cathedral performed.
1936 Collected Poems 1909-1935 (first appearance of "Burnt Norton").
1939 The Family Reunion performed. The Idea of a Christian Society published.
Last issue of Criterion.
1940 East Coker published.
1941 The Dry Salvages published.
1942 Little Gidding published.
1947 Vivien Eliot dies.
1948 Wins Nobel Prize for Literature. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture published.
1949 The Cocktail Party performed.
1953 The Confidential Clerk performed.
1957 Married Valerie Fletcher on January 10. On Poetry and Poets published.
1958 The Elder Statesman performed.
1963 Collected Poems 1909-1962.
1965 Dies on January 4th; his ashes to East Coker.
T.S. Eliot Biographical Summary
Eliot was born into a prominent Unitarian Saint Louis, Missouri family; his fifth cousin,
Tom Eliot, was Chancellor of Washington University, and his grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot,
was the school's founder. Eliot's major work shows few signs of St. Louis, although there was,
in his youth, a Prufrock furniture store in town.
Eliot graduated from Harvard University in 1909. Following a tour of Germany which was curtailed
by the outbreak of World War I, Eliot made his life and literary career in Britain. After the
war, in the 1920s, he would spend time with other great artists in the Montparnasse Quarter in
Paris, France where he was photographed by Man Ray. He dabbled in the study of Sanskrit and
eastern religions and was a student of G. I. Gurdjieff.
In 1915, through the assistance of Ezra Pound, Eliot was able to publish a poem, The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock, which brought him to prominence. His style was noted at the time for
its freshness and modernism.
In a letter to Conrad Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot complained that he was still a virgin,
adding "I am very dependent upon women. I mean female society." Less than four months later he
was introduced to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess, by mutual friends in Oxford.
At the end of the year, Eliot and Vivienne, both 27 years old, were married in register office.
"Tom" did not know that she had a history of recurrent illnesses, including episodes of headaches,
backaches, stomachaches, prolonged exhaustion, nervous collapse and excitability,
all requiring medication with drugs, some of them morphine-based, that had become
habit-forming. Nor that she was subject to excessive, over-frequent menstrual periods.
Bertrand Russell soon took an interest in Vivenne.
In the 1960s, Eliot would write: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with [Vivienne]
simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she
persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping
him in England. To her the marriage brought no happiness . . . to me it brought the state of
mind out of which came The Waste Land."
In October 1922, Eliot published the long poem The Waste Land in The Criterion. Composed during
a period of enormous personal difficulty for Eliot -- his ill-fated marriage was already
foundering, and both he and Vivien suffered from precarious health -- The Waste Land became
one of the principal examples of a new trend in English poetry and came to represent the disillusionment
of the post-World War I generation. By the time The Dial republished the poem in November
of 1923, Eliot had already distanced himself from the poem’s vision of despair;
“My present ideas are very different” he wrote at that time.
Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem -- its slippage between satire and prophecy,
its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating
summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures -- the poem has
nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are
"April is the cruellest month"; "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and
"Shantih shantih shantih."
Eliot separated from his wife in 1933. For the last nine years of her life she was confined to
a mental hospital, where Eliot did not visit. She tried many times to waylay him, but succeeded
only in November 1935: holding their dog Polly and wearing the black shirt of the British
Union of Fascists - which she perhaps joined to please her husband, who had on one occasion
expressed some admiration for Mussolini - she was able to get close enough to him after one
of his public lectures and ask when he would be coming home.
Eliot's later work, following his conversion to Anglicanism on June 29, 1927, is often but by
no means exclusively religious in nature, but it also attempts to preserve historical English
values which Eliot thought important. He summarised his beliefs at the time by saying,
'I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.'
This period includes such works as The Hollow Men, Ash-Wednesday, The Journey of the Magi,
and Four Quartets. Eliot considered Four Quartets to be his masterpiece, as it draws upon
his vast knowledge of mysticism and philosophy. It consists of four poems, "Burnt Norton,
" "The Dry Salvages," "East Coker," and "Little Gidding." Each of these runs to several
hundred lines total and is broken into five sections. Although they resist easy
characterization, they have many things in common: each begins with a rumination on the
geographical location of its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in some important
respect--theological, historical, physical, and on its relation to the human condition.
A reflective early reading suggests an inexact systematicity among them; they approach
the same ideas in varying but overlapping ways, although they do not necessarily exhaust
their questions.
"Burnt Norton" asks what it means to consider things that aren't the case but might have been.
We see the shell of an abandoned house, and Eliot toys with the idea that all these
"merely possible" realities are present together, but invisible to us: All the possible ways
people might walk across a courtyard add up to a vast dance we can't see; children who aren't
there are hiding in the bushes.
Eliot's plays, mostly in verse, include Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939),
The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958).
Murder in the Cathedral is a frankly religious piece about the death of St Thomas Becket.
He confessed to being influenced by, among others, the works of 17th century preacher,
Lancelot Andrewes. Later, he was appointed to the committee formed to produce the "New English"
translation of the Bible. In 1939 he published a book of poetry for children,
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats ("Old Possum" being a name Pound had bestowed upon him),
which after his death became the basis of the hit West End and Broadway musical by Andrew
Lloyd Webber, Cats.
On November 4, 1948, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his outstanding,
pioneer contribution to present-day poetry".
After his death, his body was cremated and, according to Eliot's wishes, the ashes taken to
St Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from which Eliot's ancestors emigrated to
America. A simple plaque commemorates him.
As a note of trivia, late in his life, Eliot became somewhat of a penpal with comedian Groucho
Marx. Eliot even requested a portrait of the comedian, which he then proudly displayed in his
home.