Biography of TS Eliot Essay
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and last
child of Henry Ware Eliot, a brick manufacturer, and Charlotte (Stearns) Eliot, who was active in
social reform and was herself a not–untalented poet. Both parents were descended from families that
had emigrated from England to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. William Greenleaf Eliot,
the poet's paternal grandfather, had, after his graduation from Harvard in the 1830s, moved to St.
Louis, where he became a Unitarian minister, but the New England connection was closely
maintained––especially, during Eliot's youth, through the family's summer home on the Atlantic
coast in Gloucester, Massachusetts. ... Show more content on Helpwriting.net ...
Upon his return to America, Eliot returned as well to Harvard, where he undertook graduate studies
in philosophy and also served as a teaching assistant. Awarded a traveling fellowship for the 1914–
1915 academic year, he intended to study in Germany, but the outbreak of World War I in August
1914 forced him to leave the country after only several weeks. He made his way to London,
England, which would become his home for the remaining fifty years of his life. There, on
September 22, 1914, through his Harvard classmate and fellow poet, he met Ezra Pound, who would
exert a great influence over the development of his work and his literary career. In the spring of the
following year occurred a meeting that would have more momentous consequences for Eliot's life,
with Vivien Haigh–Wood, a vivacious young woman who intrigued him because of her difference
from everything that he was accustomed to, and whom he married on June 26, 1915, after an
acquaintance of two months. This impulsive act may have been an attempt, perhaps unconscious, to
save the poet in himself from the encroachments of parental influence and an academic future. At
his parents' urging, he finished his doctoral dissertation and submitted it to Harvard, but he never
completed his degree or
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