24 Jul TS Eliot
TS Eliot was undoubtedly one of the most important poets of the 20th Century (indeed in all of English literature). He is probably best remembered for The Waste Land (1922), in which he laments the condition of his generation and of Western civilization. Other significant poems include The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock (1915), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1936-42). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.
Born in St Louis, Missouri, Eliot moved to England in 1914 at the age of 25. In 1925 he took a position at the publishing house, Faber and Faber, where he stayed for the rest of his life. While there he championed many English poets, including WH Auden and Ted Hughes. He became a British subject in 1927. Eliot died at his London home in 1965 at the age of 76. His body was cremated and the ashes were taken to St Michael and All Angels’ Church in the Eliot ancestral village of East Coker, Somerset (130 miles southwest of London). In London, he is commemorated by a large memorial stone in the floor of Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.