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Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis to a prominent industrialist who came from a well-connected Boston family. Eliot attended Harvard for both his undergraduate and graduate studies in literature and philosophy. He completed his dissertation while pursuing further studies at the Sorbonne and Oxford. However, when the First World War broke out and prevented his return to Massachusetts for his Ph.D. defense, Eliot remained in England and committed himself fully to poetry. In 1914, he had already completed much of his work on “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which would be published the following year. He also met his fellow American-in-exile, Ezra Pound, in 1914. Pound served both as a mentor and a champion of Eliot’s work. He also played a prominent role as an editor for Eliot’s most groundbreaking poem, The Waste Land. This work, first published in 1922, forged a new kind of poetry from the fragmentary wreckage of a modern world blasted by war. Though Eliot would go on to write more poetry and criticism, nothing in his later career was as impactful as The Waste Land, an appropriately broken hymn to a disintegrated civilization. Eliot died in 1965, in London.

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