Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotelsĪnd sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, When the evening is spread out against the sky In 1948, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. During the 1930s-50s, he continued to publish poems, plays, and essays and other critical works, cementing his role as one of the most influential figures of the modernist movement. In 1927, Eliot renounced his American citizenship in favor of British citizenship and converted to Anglicanism, a move that reverberated throughout his writing-most notably in the “Four Quartets,” which was his last major poetic work. Eliot produced no children with either wife. While Eliot had several public female companions in subsequent years, he did not marry again until 1957, when he wed his secretary, Esme Valerie Fletcher. He wed Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, an unhappy marriage that resulted in separation in 1933. Pound was an influential editor to Eliot’s other works, including the canonical “ The Waste Land,” published in 1934.Įliot left Oxford but remained in England where he took on various jobs, including teaching, banking, and writing book reviews for supplementary income. Alfred Prufrock” in Poetry magazine in 1915 it became the first of his major works. With Pound’s encouragement, Eliot published “The Love Song of J. Around this time, a mutual friend introduced Eliot to Ezra Pound, whose friendship would have an enormous impact on his literary life. Eliot attended the Sorbonne in Paris for a year before eventually earning a fellowship to Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. As a result, he developed a love of reading and writing at a young age, composing original poetry as early as 14.Īs a teenager, Eliot attended preparatory school at Milton Academy in Massachusetts before matriculating at Harvard College, where he discovered many of the writers and texts-like Arthur Symon’s The Symbolist Movement-that would later become influential in his own poetics. Although he was the youngest of six children, Eliot’s childhood was often solitary due to a medical condition that prevented him from physical activity. He was distant with his father, a successful businessman, but close to his mother-a poet who encouraged her son’s budding interest in literature. Louis, Missouri to a prominent Boston family that had relocated to Missouri in 1834 to establish a Unitarian church. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Notably, in a move that rebels against the most optimistic tradition of the romantic poets who came before him, Eliot chooses to end his poem with the death of his speaker, underscoring the dangers inherent in the modern world. With its subject a middle-aged, despairing man who fails to connect with the world around him, “Prufrock” continues to rattle even contemporary readers in its striking portrayal of loneliness and isolation. Alfred Prufrock” introduced Eliot to the literary scene, presenting ideas of modern alienation, fragmentation, and disillusionment with the world that would continue to form other works in his oeuvre. After completing his studies at Harvard, he moved to England and became acquainted with other major figures of modernism, including Ezra Pound who encouraged Eliot to send out “Prufrock” for publication. Eliot wrote “Prufrock” in 1910-11, while studying at Harvard University and developing the philosophical underpinnings that would inform later works.
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