T.S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was an American-born poet, playwright, and critic who became a naturalized British citizen and is regarded as one of the towering figures of literary modernism. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, he studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford before settling in England, where he spent most of his working life, eventually joining the publishing house Faber and Faber. His early masterpiece «The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock» announced a strikingly new poetic voice, fragmented, ironic, and deeply attuned to modern urban alienation.

Eliot’s reputation was cemented by «The Waste Land» (1922), a landmark poem that captured the disillusionment and cultural fragmentation of the post-World War I era through dense allusion, shifting voices, and formal innovation; it remains one of the most studied poems in the English language. His later conversion to Anglo-Catholicism reshaped his poetry toward themes of faith, penitence, and redemption, most visible in «Ash Wednesday» and the Four Quartets, while «The Hollow Men» stands as one of his bleakest meditations on spiritual emptiness.

Beyond poetry, Eliot was an influential critic whose essays helped define modernist literary values, and a playwright whose works blended verse with drama. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948, and his combined body of work continues to shape how poetry, criticism, and religious feeling intersect in the twentieth century.