The World of T. S. Eliot and His
Poetry
| 1888 | Thomas Stearns Eliot is born on September 26, in St. Louis, Missouri, to Henry Ware and Charlotte Stearns Eliot. The youngest of seven children, Eliot is brought up in a prosperous household. His grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had attended Harvard Divinity School before heading west to found the first Unitarian church in St. Louis. |
| 1889- 1904 | Thomas is educated at Smith Academy in St. Louis. The family spends summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where the young boy learns to sail and fish; these summers instill in him a love of the sea and a New England sensibility. William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), and Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904) are published. Queen Victoria dies ( 1901 ). |
| 1905 | Eliot attends Milton Academy near Boston for one year. |
| 1906- 1910 | He joins his older brother, Henry, at Harvard (1906). While an undergraduate, Eliot studies with Irving Babbitt and George Santayana; his academic interests are wide-ranging and diverse. The Symbolist movement deeply influences the young writer. He contributes poems to the Harvard literary magazine, The Advocate, and joins the Signet literary society. While playing the part of Mr. Woodhouse in a production of Emma, he begins a romantic relationship with Emily Hale. He earns both B.A. (1909) and M.A. ( 1910) degrees. E. M. Forster’s Howards End is published (1910). |
| 1910- 1911 | Eliot attends the Sorbonne in Paris. There he meets a variety of French artists and intellectuals, and develops a close friendship with Jean Verdenal, to whom he will dedicate Prufrock and Other Observations. Eliot writes several enduring |
| poems during this year spent abroad, including ‘Prufrock,’ ‘La Figlia che Piange,’ ‘Preludes,’ ‘Portrait of a Lady,’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night.’ | |
| 1911- 1914 | Eliot pursues a Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard. His professors, including Bertrand Russell, George Santayana, and William James, are some of the most distinguished philosophers of the twentieth century. Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy (1912) is published. |
| 1914 | While Eliot is studying in Germany, World War I begins. He takes up residence at Merton College, Oxford University, but his plans to pursue a Ph.D. are cut short by the war. In London a friend shows Eliot’s poetry to Ezra Pound, and their legendary collaboration begins. James Joyce’s Dubliners is published. Eliot will later edit Joyce’s Ulysses for serial publication. |
| 1915-1916 | ‘Prufrock’ is published in Poetry and Blast magazines. An Oxford friend introduces Eliot to Vivien Haigh-Wood. Eliot’s family is concerned because of Vivien’s history of instability. Struggling to make a living, Eliot teaches school, writes reviews, and does editing for various publications. Although he and Vivien will not travel to the United States because of the war, he finishes and submits his doctoral dissertation, ‘Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.’ Ezra Pound’s Cathay (1915) is published. In 1916 Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and C. G. Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious are published. |
| 1917 | Eliot’s knowledge of languages secures him a post with Lloyds Bank. Prufrock and Other Observations is published by The Egoist. Eliot begins editing for the journal and associating with the Bloomsbury group and other philosophers and writers. |
| 1919 | ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) appears in The Egoist. |
| 1920 | Poems 1920 and a book of criticism, The Sacred Wood, are published. Increasing tensions with his mentally ill wife cause Eliot tremendous stress. Katherine Mansfield’s Bliss, Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, and D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love are published. |
| 1921 | Eliot suffers a mental breakdown. To recuperate, he travels to Margate and then to a sanitarium in Lausanne, Switzerland. The rest proves restorative and fruitful: Eliot writes his groundbreaking The Waste Land while abroad. Ezra Pound, whose Poems, 1918-1921 is published this year, brilliantly edits The Waste Land when Eliot travels through Paris. |
| 1922 | Eliot receives a literary award from The Dial, the journal that publishes The Waste Land later this year. Eliot founds the journal The Criterion, which he will edit until 1939. James Joyce’s Ulysses is published. |
| 1923 | W. B. Yeats receives the Nobel Prize for Literature. |
| 1924 | Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is published. |
| 1925 | Poems, 1909-1925, which includes ‘The Hollow Men,’ is published. Eliot becomes an editor for the publishing house Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber). F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and the first sections of Ezra Pound’s Cantos are published. |
| 1926 | Eliot gives the Clark Lectures at Cambridge University. |
| 1927 | He becomes a British citizen and joins the Anglican Church. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian are published. |
| 1928 | For Lancelot Andrewes is published. Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall and Yeats’s The Tower are published. |
| 1929 | Dante is published. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That are published. |
| 1930 | Ash-Wednesday is published. W. H. Auden’s Poems is published. |
| 1932- 1933 | Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932) is published, as is Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama (1932). After years of anguish and tumult, Eliot separates from Vivien, although he will not divorce her because of his religious beliefs. He delivers the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard; they are published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Yeats’s Collected Poems are published (1933). |
| 1934 | After Strange Gods, the collection of lectures Eliot delivered in 1933 at the University of Virginia, is published, as |
| is Elizabethan Essays. The church pageant The Rock is performed and published. Eliot reestablishes contact with his college love, Emily Hale. Ezra Pound’s ABC of Reading is published. | |
| 1935 | Murder in the Cathedral is performed and published. |
| 1936 | Collected Poems, 1909-1935, including ‘Burnt Norton,’ is published. |
| 1937 | Wallace Stevens’s The Man with the Blue Guitar is published. |
| 1938 | Vivien is committed to the mental hospital Northumberland House. |
| 1939 | With war impending, Eliot ceases publication of The Criterion. The Family Reunion is performed and published, as are The Idea of a Christian Society and Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is published. World War II begins. |
| 1940 | East Coker is published; the poem’s title is the name of the village in Somerset, England, from which Eliot’s ancestors had emigrated to America in the 1600s. |
| 1941 | The Dry Salvages is published. |
| 1942 | Little Gidding is published. |
| 1943 | Four Quartets—an edition in one volume of ‘Burnt Norton,’ ‘East Coker,’ ‘The Dry Salvages,’ and ‘Little Gidding’ - is published. |
| 1945 | George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Bertrand Russell’s A Histor yofWestern Philosophy are published. |
| 1947 | Vivien Eliot dies. |
| 1948 | Eliot receives the Nobel Prize for Literature. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is published. |
| 1949 | The Cocktail Party is performed. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman receives the Pulitzer Prize. |
| 1950 | Poems Written in Early Youth and The Cocktail Party are published. |
| 1951 | Poetry and Drama is published. |
| 1952 | Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot) is published. |
| 1953- 1954 | The Confidential Clerk is performed and then published. |
| 1957 | Eliot marries Valerie Fletcher. On Poetry and Poets is published. |
| 1958- 1959 | The Elder Statesman is performed and then published. |
| 1963 | Collected Poems, 1909-1962 is published. |
| 1965 | Thomas Stearns Eliot dies in London on January 4. His ashes are taken to East Coker. In accordance with his wishes, his epitaph includes lines from Four Quartets: ‘In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.’ |