T.S. Eliot



Tomas Stearns Eliot was born September 26, 1888 into a prominent family from St Louis Missouri. His father Henry Ware Eliot was a successful business man. Eliot died of emphysema on January 4, 1965.

Eliot made his life in Britain. After the war, in the 1920s, he would spend time with other great artists in the Montparnasse Quarter in Paris, where he was photographed by Man Ray. French poetry was a particularly strong influence on Eliot's work, in particular Charles Baudelaire, whose clear-cut images of Paris city life provided a model for Eliot's own images of London.
He dabbled early in the study of Sanskrit and eastern religions and was a student of G. I. Gurdjieff. Eliot's work, following his conversion to Christianity and the Church of England, is sometimes religious in nature and also attempts to preserve historical English and broadly European values that Eliot thought important. In 1928, Eliot summarised his beliefs well when he wrote in the preface to his book For Lancelot Andrewes that "The general point of view [of the book's essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion." This period includes such works as Ash Wednesday, The Journey of the Magi, and Four Quartets.


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