T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot was a Harvard philosopher from St Louis who settled in London, worked in a bank, and in 1922 published The Waste Land, which Pound had cut by half and which gave the century its poem of fragments, voices and the city. He became a British subject and an Anglican in 1927, edited the Criterion and directed Faber, and wrote Four Quartets, the verse dramas and the criticism that made the metaphysical poets and the dissociation of sensibility part of every syllabus. He won the Nobel Prize in 1948. His cat poems became a musical, and his first marriage was a disaster he wrote about only obliquely.