Although T. S. Eliot (Thomas Sternes Eliot) was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, he moved to England in 1914 and officially became a British subject in 1927. The choice to leave America for England was one of many that reflect a conservative frame of mind. In 1929, Eliot described himself as an Anglo- Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics; all three look back to traditional forms of belief, literature, and government. Yet Eliot’s literary work was simultaneously revolutionary and conservative; he caught the spirit of his age by marrying modern language and classical allusion in his poetry. Eliot’s first major published poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), captured the spiritual paralysis of a world suddenly and radically changed by the First World War. In his later and perhaps most famous poem, “The Waste Land” (both also in Literature and Its Times), Eliot juxtaposed historical and literary allusions with the common speech of everyday people. When Eliot turned his attention to drama, he maintained his commitment to marrying the new to the old; for instance, he championed the writing of drama in verse, as Shakespeare and the ancient Greeks had done.
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