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In 1670 Andrew Eliot left East Coker in Somerset, England, for Boston. Two hundred and eighteen years later, his direct descendant, Thomas Stearns Eliot � who would become the most celebrated English-language poet of the century � was born in St. Louis, Mo., to a businessman and a poet, Henry and Charlotte Eliot. Although young Tom was brilliantly educated in English and European literature and in Eastern and Western philosophy and religion, he fled � in his mid 20s � the career in philosophy awaiting him at Harvard, and moved to England. There he married (disastrously), met the entrepreneurial Ezra Pound and, while working at Lloyds Bank, brought out Prufrock and Other Observations. Five years later, after a nervous breakdown and a stay in a Swiss sanatorium in Lausanne, he published The Waste Land. Modern poetry had struck its note. |
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