T.S. Eliot was an extremely private individual, leaving little behind
             for biographers. During his lifetime, Eliot earned a respected place in
             the literary world and his poetry is considered to be some of the most
             influential of the twentieth century.
             Born Thomas Stearns Eliot on September 26, 1988 to one of the most
             distinguished families of St. Louis, Missouri, Eliot was related to both
             Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Adams (Pettingell pg). He spent the first
             eighteen years of his life in St. Louis and then attended Harvard
             University, earning both undergraduate and masters degrees, then in 1910
             left the United States to study at the Sorbonne in Paris (T.S. pg). He
             then returned to Harvard and earned a doctorate in philosophy, then in
             1914, Eliot returned to Europe and settled in England, becoming a British
             citizen in 1927 (T.S. pg). He married Vivien Haigh-Wood the following year
             and began working as a teacher, the later for Lloyd's Bank in London (T.S.
             pg). While in London, Ezra Pound took notice of Eliot, recognizing at once
             his poetic genius and became a great influence in Eliot's life (T.S. pg).
             Pound assisted Eliot in the publication of his work in a several magazines
             and most notably, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' in 1915 (T.S. pg).
             In 1917, Eliot's first book of poems, Prufrock and Other
             Observations,' was published and instantly established him as a leading
             poet of the avant-garde (T.S. pg). In 1922 when The Waste Land' was
             published, his reputation grew to mythic proportions and by 1930 and for
             the next three decades, Eliot was the "most dominant figure in poetry and
             literary criticism in the English speaking world" (T.S. pg). His poetry
             transmuted his affinity for the English metaphysical poets of the 17th
             century, such as John Donne, and the 19th century French symbolist poets,
             Baudelaire and Laforgue, "into radical innovations in poe...