Thomas Sterns Eliot had a few major influences in his life. T. S. Eliot was born in Missouri. Living in St. Louis for eighteen years of his life. He also attended Harvard while he was here. He moved to Sorbornne, having already earned both undergraduate and masters degrees. He left Paris after a year and returned to Harvard to get a doctorate in philosophy, but then left again in 1914 back to Europe where he settled in England. In 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. He also met Ezra Pound, one of the few major influences in his life. When Pound saw some of his writings she immediately knew that he had talent. She helped in his publishing on his very first book of poems, which include “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. His new wife cheated on him for a short period, and she got continually worse physically and emotionally. Eliot continued to struggle to support him

22 Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;

15 But fruits of pomegranate and peach

33 He shall be washed as white as snow,

Eliot influenced a lot of what literature is today. His poetry is called some of the most influential literature of the twentieth century, while he is considered “the” modernist poet of all time. Still, to many, T. S. Eliot is just a name, but to literature he has been one of the greatest influences.

Eliot’s poems were considered to be some of the best and most influential works of the twentieth century. Eliot’s modernist style of writing got him ridiculed and accused of seemingly trying to break tradition. Pound claimed that Eliot had “actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own.” With Ezra’s help Eliot published Prufrock and Other Observations, in 1917. This gave him an enormous boost both economically and emotionally. In 1922, he published The Waste Land; a poem based on Eliot’s life in London. “With the publication in 1922 of his poem The Waste Land, Eliot won an international reputation. The Waste Land expresses with great power the disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust of the period after World War I. In a series of vignettes, loosely linked by the legend of the search for the Grail, it portrays a sterile world of panicky fears and barren lusts, and of human beings waiting for some sign or promise of redemption. The poem's style is highly complex, erudite, and allusive, and the poet provided notes and references to explain the work's many quotations and allusions. This scholarly supplement distracted some readers and critics from perceiving the true originality of the poem, which lay rather in its rendering of the universal human predicament of man desiring salvation, and in its manipulation of language, than in its range of literary references. In his earlier poems Eliot had shown himself to be a master of the poetic phrase. The Waste Land showed him to be, in addition, a metrist of great virtuosity, capable of astonishing modulations ranging from the sublime to the conversational.” The Waste Land is now considered one of the single most influential works of literature of the twentieth century. This poem was written in a jazz-like syncopated style. Which just like the jazz of the time was taken as blasphemy of sorts. The critics thought of it as trying to get rid of the traditional style, but the poem over all was taken as a rally cry because of how dillutional it sounded. Eliot, after being Unitarian for his entire life, found Anglicans beliefs. Many of the seeds of his new found faith were found in “Hollow Men”.

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