T.S. Eliot

In a time of The Great War and world disarray, many poets and writers stood out and gave many Americans inspiration. This was a period were the world was changing very quickly and unconventionally. One man by the name of Thomas Sterns Eliot did just this for two nations. He brought back the idea of having your own opinions on issues. Americans lost some respect for him, but they still gave him much credit for his well-crafted poetry. T.S. Eliot is regarded as a poet who changed the thoughts of many during World War I by writing his elaborate feelings on the rapidly changing world during the Twentieth Century.

T.S. Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri. He was the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot, a brick manufacturer, and Charlotte Stearns Eliot, who also was a poet. Both parents' families had emigrated from England to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. As a young boy T.S. Eliot attended Miss Locke's Primary School and Smith Academy Record. He graduated high school in 1905. He spent the year following his graduation at Milton academy, which is a private prep school in Massachusetts. In late September 1906 he began to study at Harvard University where he ended up meeting a few very influential people to his life. In 1909, Eliot earned a B.A. at Harvard, and stayed to earn a master's degree in English literature. After that, he left to go to school at Sorbonne and look at the scenery. When Eliot returned to America, he also returned to Harvard and continued on to take graduate courses in philosophy and also served as a teaching assistant. In 1915, Eliot was awarded a traveling fellowship, he chose to study in Germany, but the outbreak of WW 1 in August 1914 caused him to leave the country after only a few weeks. After his experience in Germany was cut short, he made his way to London, England which became his home for the remaining fifty years of his life. Through a classmate of his from Harvard, Eliot met Ezra Pound on September 22, 1914. Pound would soon become a great influence over the development of Eliot's work.