T. S. Eliot

Born in St. Louis in 1888 to a prominent Boston Brahmin family, Thomas Stearns Eliot crossed to England in 1914 at twenty-five and never really went back - became a British subject in 1927, renounced the American passport outright. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" appeared in 1915 and read like nothing else, outlandish enough to pull attention. The Waste Land followed in 1922, then "The Hollow Men" in 1925, Ash Wednesday in 1930, Four Quartets in 1943 - each one tightening the modernist grip on verse structure and language. He wrote seven plays, Murder in the Cathedral in 1935 and The Cocktail Party in 1949 among them, and spent decades re-evaluating long-held cultural beliefs in essays that carried as much weight as the poems. The Nobel Prize came in 1948 for his pioneer contribution to present-day poetry. He died in London in January 1965.