Verse drama in Britain had been unable to break away from the powerful but imperfectly understood verse of the Renaissance dramatists or to create an effective modern dramatic verse. Eliot had learned from the failure of the Romantic and Victorian practitioners of verse drama that pastiche-Renaissance dramatic verse and structure was not the way forward; but, just as crucially, he appears not to have fully understood the expressive possibilities of a theater poetry that lay outside the narrow definitions of language proper, that relied on the total expressive possibilities of the whole theatrical system rather than purely on dramatic language. Eliot found inspiration in existing models, however radically he reworked them, and his theatrical career represents a continuing dialogue between the existing dramatic forms of the conventional theater of his day, the narratives and structures (particularly the chorus) of Greek theater, and the liturgical patterns he derived from his Christian faith.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on 26 September 1888, the seventh and final child of Charlotte Champe Stearns Eliot, a schoolteacher and poet, and Henry Ware Eliot, a merchant.
