Early life and education The
Eliots were a
Boston Brahmin family with roots in England and
New England. Eliot's paternal grandfather,
William Greenleaf Eliot, had moved to
St. Louis, Missouri, to establish a
Unitarian Christian church there. His father,
Henry Ware Eliot, was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis. His mother,
Charlotte Champe Stearns, who wrote poetry, was a
social worker, then a new profession in the US. Eliot was the last of six surviving children. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns. Eliot lived in St. Louis for the first 16 years of his life at the house on
Locust Street where he was born. After going away to school in 1905, he returned to St. Louis only for holidays and visits. Despite moving away from the city, Eliot wrote to a friend that "Missouri and
the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on me than any other part of the world." Eliot was drawn to literature in childhood. Struggling from a congenital double
inguinal hernia, he could not participate in many physical activities. Often isolated, his love for literature developed. Once he learned to read, the young boy immediately became obsessed with books, favouring tales of savage life, the Wild West, or
Mark Twain's
Tom Sawyer. In his memoir about Eliot, his friend Robert Sencourt comments that the young Eliot "would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living." Eliot credited his hometown with fuelling his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London." From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended
Smith Academy, the boys college preparatory division of
Washington University, where his studies included
Ancient Greek,
Latin,
French, and
German. He began to write poetry when he was 14, under the influence of
Edward Fitzgerald's translation of the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing and he destroyed them. Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" in
The Harvard Advocate. He published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". The last mentioned story reflected his exploration of the
Igorot Village while visiting the
1904 St. Louis World's Fair. His interest in
indigenous peoples thus predated his anthropological studies at
Harvard University. Following graduation from Smith Academy, Eliot attended
Milton Academy in
Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where he met
Scofield Thayer, who later published
The Waste Land. He studied at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning a Bachelor of Arts in an elective programme similar to comparative literature in 1909 and a Master of Arts in English literature the following year.
Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908 when he discovered
Arthur Symons's
The Symbolist Movement in Literature. This introduced him to
Jules Laforgue,
Arthur Rimbaud and
Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of
Tristan Corbière and his book
Les amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot's life. After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris where, from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the
University of Paris. He attended lectures by
Henri Bergson and read poetry with
Alain-Fournier. From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and
Sanskrit. While a member of the Harvard Graduate School, Eliot fell in love with
Emily Hale. Eliot was awarded a scholarship to
Merton College, Oxford, in 1914. He first visited
Marburg in the
German Empire, where he planned to take a summer programme, but when the
First World War broke out he went to the
University of Oxford instead. At the time so many American students attended Merton that the
Junior Common Room proposed a motion "that this society abhors the
Americanization of Oxford". It was defeated by two votes after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed
American culture. Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls [...] Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead." In the end, Eliot did not settle at Merton and left after a year. In 1915 he taught English at
Birkbeck College, University of London. In 1916 he completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on "Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of
F. H. Bradley", but failed to return for the
viva voce examination.
Marriage , passport photograph from 1920 Before leaving the US, Eliot had told Emily Hale that he was in love with her. He exchanged letters with her from Oxford during 1914 and 1915, but they did not meet again until 1927. In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote: "I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society)." Less than four months later, Thayer introduced Eliot to
Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge
governess. They were married at Hampstead Register Office on 26 June 1915. After a short visit, alone, to his family in the United States, Eliot returned to London and took several teaching jobs. The philosopher
Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivienne while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars have suggested that she and Russell had an affair, but the allegations were never confirmed. The marriage seems to have been markedly unhappy, in part because of Vivienne's health problems. In a letter addressed to Ezra Pound, she covers an extensive list of her symptoms, which included a recurrent high temperature,
fatigue,
insomnia,
migraines, and
colitis. This, coupled with apparent mental instability, meant that she was often sent away by Eliot and her doctors for extended periods in the hope of improving her health. As time went on, he became increasingly detached from her. According to witnesses, both Eliots were frequent complainers of illness, physical and mental, while Eliot would drink excessively and Vivienne is said to have developed a liking for opium and ether, drugs prescribed for medical issues. It is claimed that the couple's wearying behaviour caused some visitors to vow never to spend another evening in the company of both together. The couple separated in 1932 and formally separated in 1933, and in 1938 Vivienne's brother, Maurice, had her committed to a mental hospital, against her will, where she remained until her death of heart disease in 1947. When told via a phone call from the asylum that Vivienne had died unexpectedly during the night, Eliot is said to have buried his face in his hands and cried out 'Oh God, oh God.'
Teaching, banking, and publishing 's Faber Building, 24
Russell Square, London After leaving Merton, Eliot worked as a schoolteacher, most notably at
Highgate School in London, where he taught French and Latin: his students included
John Betjeman. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis also maintained a close friendship, leading to Lewis's later making
his well-known portrait painting of Eliot in 1938.
Charles Whibley recommended Eliot to
Geoffrey Faber. In 1925 Eliot left Lloyds to become a director in the publishing firm
Faber and Gwyer (later
Faber & Faber), where he remained for the rest of his career. At Faber & Faber, he was responsible for publishing distinguished English poets, including
W. H. Auden,
Stephen Spender,
Charles Madge and
Ted Hughes.
Conversion to Anglicanism and British citizenship building where Eliot worked from 1925 to 1965; the commemorative plaque is under the right-hand arch. On 29 June 1927 Eliot converted from
Unitarianism to
Anglicanism, and in November that year he took
British citizenship, thereby renouncing his United States citizenship in the event he had not officially done so previously. He became a
churchwarden of his parish church,
St Stephen's, Gloucester Road, London, and a life member of the
Society of King Charles the Martyr. He specifically identified as
Anglo-Catholic, proclaiming himself "
classicist in literature,
royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion". About 30 years later Eliot commented on his religious views that he combined "a Catholic cast of mind, a Calvinist heritage, and a Puritanical temperament". He also had wider spiritual interests, commenting that "I see the path of progress for modern man in his occupation with his own self, with his inner being" and citing
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and
Rudolf Steiner as exemplars of such a direction. One of Eliot's biographers,
Peter Ackroyd, commented that "the purposes of [Eliot's conversion] were two-fold. One: the
Church of England offered Eliot some hope for himself, and I think Eliot needed some resting place. But secondly, it attached Eliot to the English community and English culture." From 1933 to 1946 Eliot had a close emotional relationship with
Emily Hale. Eliot later destroyed Hale's letters to him, but Hale donated Eliot's to Princeton University Library where they were
sealed, following Eliot's and Hale's wishes, for 50 years after both had died, until 2020. When Eliot heard of the donation he deposited his own account of their relationship with Harvard University to be opened whenever the Princeton letters were. From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat at 19
Carlyle Mansions, Chelsea, with his friend
John Davy Hayward, who collected and managed Eliot's papers, styling himself "Keeper of the Eliot Archive". Hayward also collected Eliot's pre-Prufrock verse, commercially published after Eliot's death as
Poems Written in Early Youth. When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to
King's College, Cambridge, in 1965. On 10 January 1957, at the age of 68, Eliot married
Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber & Faber since August 1949. They kept their wedding secret; the ceremony was held in St Barnabas Church,
Kensington, London, at 6:15 am with virtually no one in attendance other than his wife's parents. In the early 1960s, by then in failing health, Eliot worked as an editor for the
Wesleyan University Press, seeking new poets in Europe for publication. After Eliot's death, Valerie dedicated her time to preserving his legacy, by editing and annotating
The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of
The Waste Land. Valerie Eliot died on 9 November 2012 at her home in London. Eliot had no children with either of his wives.
Death and honours Eliot died of
emphysema at his home in
Kensington in London, on 4 January 1965, and was cremated at
Golders Green Crematorium. In accordance with his wishes, his ashes were taken to
St Michael and All Angels' Church, East Coker, the village in Somerset from which his Eliot ancestors had emigrated to America. A wall plaque in the church commemorates him with a quotation from his poem
East Coker: "In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning." In 1967, on the second anniversary of his death, Eliot was commemorated by the placement of a large stone in the floor of
Poets' Corner in
Westminster Abbey. The stone, cut by the designer
Reynolds Stone, is inscribed with his life dates, his
Order of Merit, and a quotation from his poem
Little Gidding, "the communication / of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living." In 1986 a
blue plaque was placed on the building - No. 3
Kensington Court Gardens - where he lived and died. ==Poetry==