T S Eliot: Poet And Playwright
One of the 20th century’s greatest writers
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26th September 1888 in St Louis, Missouri, USA, the seventh and easily the youngest child of Henry Ware Eliot, a businessman, and Charlotte Champe Stearns, a teacher and amateur poet.
After being schooled at Smith Academy he went to Harvard University in 1906, although he was only moderately successful as a student, despite discovering the world of poetry.
In 1910 he spent a postgraduate year in Paris at the Sorbonne, where he was introduced to European culture and the conflicting philosophical and political ideas of the age. He returned to Harvard in 1911 to undertake a doctoral level study of philosophy.
He had already started to write some of his best-known poems at this stage, including “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, “Portrait of a Lady” and “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”.
His philosophical studies were wide-ranging, but he became particularly interested in exploring states of consciousness. This led him to study Eastern thought as well as Western, and to be critical of the emerging subjects of psychology and sociology. Among those who influenced him at Harvard were William James, Bertrand Russell and George Santayana.