Leader of the Modernist movement and Nobel laureate, Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and later took British citizenship. His sequence The Waste Land appeared in 1922, followed by Four Quartets (1943). Earlier work included Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and Ash-Wednesday (1930). Eliot also wrote for the stage, notably the verse drama Murder in the Cathedral (1935), and worked as an influential critic and publisher. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 and the British Order of Merit the same year.
Who was your "gateway poet," the poet whose first book or poem made you want to write?
Wildly, I think I can trace my interest in poetry back to high school, and reading “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot. Our English teacher had the class memorize different lines of the poem and it was an incredibly Dead Poets Society moment for me.