The Sacred Wood

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was a poet, a dramatist and a literary critic. His works The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), and Four Quartets (1945) were considered major achievements of twentieth century Modernist poetry. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. French poetry was a strong influence on Eliot's works, in particular that of Charles Baudelaire, whose clear-cut images of Paris city life provided a model for Eliot's own images of London. In his critical and theoretical writing, he was known for his advocacy of the "objective correlative, " the notion that art should not be a personal expression, but should work through objective universal symbols. He died of emphysema in London in 1965.