Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and became the most influential poet of twentieth-century modernism in the English language. Educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Merton College, Oxford, he settled in England and became a British subject in 1927. His poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) announced a radically new poetic sensibility; The Waste Land (1922), with its fragmented structure and allusive density, reshaped the possibilities of poetry. His four long poems Four Quartets (1943) are considered a crowning achievement. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 and the Order of Merit the same year. He spent much of his career as an editor and publisher at Faber and Faber.