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The Wasteland.
T.S. Eliot.
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TS Eliot. The Wasteland.
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About the author
Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26,
1888 - January 4, 1965), was an Anglo-
American poet, dramatist, and literary
critic.
Eliot was born into a prominent Unitarian Saint Louis, Missouri
family; his fifth cousin, Tom Eliot, was Chancellor of Washington
University, and his grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, was the
school’s founder. Eliot’s major work shows few signs of St. Louis, but
there was, in his youth, a Prufrock furniture store in town.
Following his graduation from Harvard University in 1909, T.S.
Eliot made his life and literary career in Britain, following the
curtailment of a tour of Germany by the outbreak of World War I.
After the War, in the 1920s, he would spend time with other great
artists in the Montparnasse Quarter in Paris, France where he
would be photographed by Man Ray. He dabbled in Buddhism and
studied Sanskrit and was a student of G. I. Gurdjieff.
Through the influence of Ezra Pound he came to prominence
with the publication of a poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, in
1915. His style was very fresh and modernist.
In 1922 came the publication of Eliot’s long poem The Waste
Land. Composed during a period of enormous personal difficulty for
Eliot—his ill-fated marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood was already
foundering, and both he and Vivien suffered from precarious
health—The Waste Land offered a bleak portrait of post-World War
I Europe, sometimes laced with disgust, but also hesitantly gesturing
towards the possibility of (religious?) redemption. Despite the
famous difficulty of the poem—its slippage between satire and
prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location
and time, its elegaic but intimidating summoning up of a vast and
dissonant range o