Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died in 1965 in England. Between these two dates, he transformed himself from an American philosophy student to a powerful British man of letters, and in the process also transformed modern English poetry. The Waste Land was first published in 1922 in the shadow of World War I and the chaotic, depressed culture of rebuilding and reflection that followed it. The poem became one of the key works of "modernism," an important artistic trend of the early-to-mid 1900s that sought to break with traditional forms and in post-World War I works often reflected a sense of disillusion with the modern world.
World War I. On August 3, 1914, Eliot was forced to leave the German town of Marburg, where he was on a travel grant from Harvard University, because the German army had just invaded Belgium in the opening days of the First World War. His displacement turned out not to be too much of an inconvenience for him, since he had already arranged to spend the academic year at Oxford University in England, working on his doctoral thesis in philosophy.
