T.S. Eliot: Introduction to The Waste Land

"You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl."

Poet Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on the 26th of September 1888 into a distinguished family in St Louis, Missouri.

He studied Literature at Harvard, earning a Bachelor's and a Master of Arts, before moving to England in 1914, when he was twenty-five, to study Philosophy at Merton College, Oxford.

In 1916, he completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley but, with the outbreak of war, he never returned to America to take the final examination. In 1927, at thirty-nine years of age, he became a British citizen.

The Waste Land, said to be the first great modernist poem, and probably Eliot’s most famous, was published in 1922, four years after the end of the Great War, and transformed the nature of poetry.