American-born, British-naturalized poet, critic, playwright, and editor — the central figure of Anglo-American literary modernism, whose poetry and criticism reshaped English-language verse and the vocabulary of literary judgment for two generations. Eliot left St. Louis for Harvard, Paris, Oxford, and then permanent exile in London, where he worked at Lloyds Bank, then at Faber & Faber (editing much of the 20th-century canon into print), married twice, converted to Anglicanism in 1927, and won the Nobel Prize in 1948.
The Waste Land (1922) — edited down from a larger manuscript by Ezra Pound — gave post-war Europe the single poem that seemed, to its first readers, to say what the war had done to Western culture: a fragmented, polyglot, allusion-dense assembly of voices and ruins, held together by formal compression and a grief too careful to announce itself. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) had already worked the same compression in a different key. Four Quartets (1935–42), his mature masterwork, is a more meditative, explicitly Christian poem on time, memory, and the possibility of meaning within history.
As a critic Eliot was almost as influential as he was as a poet. Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), The Sacred Wood (1920), and the later essays proposed a theory of literary tradition — the living poet altering the order of past poetry by the fact of his own writing — that underwrote the New Criticism and the curricula of American English departments for half a century. His politics ("classical in literature, royalist in politics, anglo-catholic in religion") hardened with age and have not worn as well as the poems, some of which are still as strange on the hundredth reading as the first.