Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 26, 1888, Thomas Stearns Eliot spent his youth in St. Louis and New England. Eliot earned his A.B. and an M.A. degrees in philosophy at Harvard University in 1906. He spent the next few years abroad (London, Paris, and Marburg, Germany) before settling in London in 1914. Since his early days at Harvard, Eliot had been writing poetry, but it was not until he met Ezra Pound in September 1914, that his work received any special attention. Pound was so impressed with Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” that he sent it to Harriet Monroe, renowned editor of Poetry, proclaiming it “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American” (Pound in Ackroyd, p. 44). “Prufrock” was published in June 1915, and that same month, Eliot married Englishwoman Vivien (also spelled Vivienne) Haigh-Wood. In 1917, Eliot began work as a clerk for Lloyd’s Bank in the Colonial and Foreign Department. Meanwhile, he continued to write poetry and, that same year, took a position as assistant editor at The Egoist, a prominent literary magazine. In 1922 in the English journal Criterion, Eliot published The Waste Land, a work that would revolutionize modern poetry with its radical use of free verse, multiple perspectives, and literary allusion.
