Thomas Stearns Eliot, son of the successful businessman Henry Ware Eliot in 1888, was a noted poet, literary critic, and playwright. He was born in St. Louis, Missouri, United States on September 26. Eliot came to the UK as an immigrant at the age of 25 (in the year 1914) and acquired British citizenship in the year 1927. However, he never favored a nation of the two and had the same taste for New England and the Southwest. . For his outstanding contributions to the world of poetry, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1948 The Waste Land, The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men, etc. they are the most prolific among his poems. There is a lot to know about TS Eliot and here are the 5 cool facts people should know about him.

1) Friendship with Ezra Pound – Pound and Eliot’s meeting took place in Europe during 1914 and immediate friendship grew between them as they were both exiles with great interest in the arts. Before that, Eliot wandered many places to publish his “Prufrock”, but was rejected. In 1915, Ezra Pound suggested to Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry Magazine, that she publish the poem. The conversations, letters, poems and essays that have flown between them are considered the driving force behind Modernism.

2) First Marriage and The Wasteland – On June 26, 1915 TS Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood; Unfortunately, the marriage did not turn out to be a happy union as she suffered from frequent migraines, insomnia, colitis, fatigue, high fever, and mental instability. Eliot had to suffer mentally when seeing his wife constantly visiting the doctors and affirmed that the torment that he felt during those has encouraged him to write “The wasteland.”

3) Captain – Lyndall Gordon, Eliot’s biographer in the book “TS Eliot: A Modern Life”, writes about some fascinating behavior of Eliot. During the early parts of the 1920s, there were two hiding places for Eliot, one on Charing Cross Road. and the other on St. Martin’s Lane. When he was in the first one, he only responded when people called him “El Capitan” and when he was in the second one, he only responded when people called him “Captain Eliot”.

4) Faber & Faber – Eliot was considered a joker while working at Faber & Faber. This was due to his behavior during a board meeting where he placed firecrackers between the president’s legs and lit them. In addition, he greeted the authors with cushions on the chairs and offering them explosive cigars.

5) Anti-Semitism: Does TS Eliot Hate Jews? There are many literary critics such as Harold Bloom, George Steiner, James Fenton, Christopher Ricks, and James Fenton, who criticized Eliot for adopting anti-Semitic elements in his works. Anthony Julius in his work “TS Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form” revealed the comparison of Jews with rats in the poem “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a cigar”.

TS Eliot, considered the most enigmatic character of his time, died on January 4, 1965 at his home in Kensington, London. The man who effectively lectured 13,523 people at the University of Minnesota was forever silent due to emphysema, but his works will remain inspiring and influential forever.