T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, essayist and playwright, and a leading figure of modernist poetry in English, whose pessimistic language, style and verse structure changed the art. He was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature and is considered one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His long poem The Waste Land is among the defining texts of literary modernism. He is also noted for critical essays that often re-evaluated long-held cultural beliefs. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, he moved to England in 1914 at the age of twenty-five, settled there, and became a British subject in 1927.