WORLD FAMOUS WRITERS - T.S ELIOT

 Thomas Stearns Eliot, (born September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.—died January 4, 1965, London, England), American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943).

 

In 1921, he wrote the poem "The Waste Land" while recovering from exhaustion. The dense, allusion-heavy poem went on to redefine the genre and became one of the  

most talked about poems in literary history. For his lifetime of poetic innovation, Eliot won the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

T. S. Eliot's playful cat poems have delighted readers and cat lovers around the world ever since they were first published in 1939. They were originally composed for his godchildren, with Eliot posing as Old Possum himself, and later inspired the legendary musical "Cats."

Eliot   is still considered a significant writer because of his innovative style. ... Eliot's poems such as "The Waste Land" and "The Love Song of J.

 In 1915, he married Miss Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who died in 1947. They had no children. In January, 1957, Eliot married Miss Valerie Fletcher, his private secretary. He was then 68 years old and his bride about 30.

  He is best known as a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry .

His  best  known  works  are  -

 
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915) The Waste Land (1922) Four Quartets (1943) Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

 The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948 was awarded to Thomas Stearns Eliot "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry."

• The  Waste   Land .

The Waste Land is a modernist poem by T. S. Eliot that illuminates the devastating aftereffects of World War I. First published in 1922, the poem is considered by many to be Eliot's masterpiece. The five sections of the poem employ multiple shifting speakers and delve into themes of war, trauma, disillusion, and death.

 In "The Waste Land," Eliot delivers an indictment against the self-serving, irresponsibility of modern society, but not without giving us, particularly the youth a message of hope at the end of the Thames River.

The originality of The Waste Land, and its importance for most poetry in English since 1922, lies in Eliot's ability to meld a deep awareness of literary tradition with the experimentalism of free verse, to fuse private and public meanings, and to combine moments of lyric intensity into a poem of epic scope.

• Four Quartets 
•  

The Four Quartets are poems about a nation and about a culture which is very severely under threat, and in a sense, you could describe The Four Quartets as a poem of memory, but not the memory of one individual but the memory of a whole civilization."

 Eliot was unable to finish the poem until September 1942. Like the three previous poems of the Four Quartets, the central theme is time and humanity's place within it. Each generation is seemingly united and the poem describes a unification within Western civilisation.

 

Eliot died of emphysema at his home in Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken to St Michael and All Angels' Church, East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors had emigrated to America.

 

T.S  ELIOT