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He proved himself to be an essential part of literature’s history, being not only a poet but a literary critic, a playwright, leader of literature’s modernist movement and winner of Nobel Prize in field of literature. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis on 26th September 1888 (Shook 722) to Henry Ware Eliot and Charlotte Stearns Eliot. He had six other siblings; his mother was a poet too. In 1905 he graduated high school, the following year was spent at a private prep school called Milton academy in Massachusetts.

He started his term at Harvard in 1906 September, he studied from professors like Irving Abbott and Paul Elmer there, and both of whom became a major influence on Eliot’s writing. There influence on Eliot was through his stress on tradition and his classicism. Eliot also studied Dante’s poetry which too became his primary inspiration and source of enthusiasm. Eliot completed his B.A in 1909 and stayed at Harvard to complete English literature’s master’s degree. He left in fall of next year and went to Paris where he spent a year.

He took courses at Sorbonne, wrote, read and mostly soaked the atmosphere in Paris. When he returned to States, he also went back to Harvard, where he continued taking graduate course now in philosophy, also serving as teaching assistant. In academic session 1914-1915 he was awarded travelling fellowship, with that he chose to go to Germany to study, yet he had to leave from there after just few weeks due to outbreak of World War 1. He went to London after his stay at Germany was terminated, which then became his permanent home.

Eliot got a chance to meet Ezra Pound, through a class fellow from Harvard on 22nd September 1914; Pound too soon became major influence on Eliot’s literary career and its development. Eliot wrote one of his most famous poems “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”