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"The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire."

The man who wrote the most despairing poem of the twentieth century is today mostly remembered as the author of doggerel verse made popular in the hit musical Cats. Besides his poetry (the serious, the light, and the profoundly Christian), he produced literary criticism and drama so fine he was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature and the British Order of Merit.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis to a family descended from New England stock. There was no smoking or drinking in the Eliot household, and the literary-minded family—Tom, his brother, five sisters, and mother—would gather around his father, a wholesale grocer, as he read Dickens aloud. In fact, frail Tom spent much of his childhood curled up in a big leather armchair reading.

He was sent to New England to private schools and was accepted at Harvard University, where he studied under the likes of philosopher and poet George Santayana and completed his degree in three years. Though naturally shy, he gained a reputation as a dancer and party-goer, and when he decided he was too puny, he took boxing lessons.

Eliot won a traveling fellowship to Germany in 1914; he barely escaped getting caught by the war and made his way to Britain. It turned out to be a long stay. He never returned to take his oral examination, which was all that stood between him and a Harvard Ph.D.

After a year at Oxford University, then a stint at teaching history, Latin, French, German, arithmetic, drawing, and swimming in English schools, he became a banker with Lloyds of London. Later he became an editor with Faber and Faber (where he eventually became known as a prolific writer of blurbs for book jackets).

Meanwhile he brooded over the crumbling of European civilization.

His first masterpiece, the first "modernist" poem in English, was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a portrait of an aging man reviewing a life frittered away between timid hopes and lost opportunities:

For I have known them all already, known them all
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons …

With the publication of "The Waste Land" in 1922, he came to international attention. The poem begins,

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

It expresses the disillusionment and disgust after World War I, portraying a fearful world pursuing barren lusts, yearning desperately for any sign of redemption. It is considered by many to be the most influential poem of the twentieth century.

Eliot's despair, however, was short-lived. After reading agnostic Bertrand Russell's essay "A Free Man's Worship," essentially an argument that man must worship man, Eliot decided its reasoning was shallow. He moved in the opposite direction and in 1927 was confirmed in the Church of England. The same year, he also gave up his American citizenship and became a British subject.

His faith became more widely known with the publication of "Ash Wednesday" in 1930, a poem showing the difficult search for truth ("Where shall the word be found, where will the word / Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence") and the discovery of a faith that will last, expressed in the repeated phrase, "Because I do not hope to turn again." Though criticized sharply by the literati for his turn to Christianity, he continued to express his faith in his poetry.

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