60 Fun Facts About T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot was born in 1888 in which American city?

His grandfather had gone west to found a Unitarian church there; Eliot said Missouri and the Mississippi left a deeper mark on him than anywhere else.

What do the initials T. S. stand for?

He was named after his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns, and known to friends as Tom.

Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature in which year?

The citation praised his 'outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry'.

Eliot became a British subject in 1927 at what age?

He renounced his American citizenship in the same year he converted to Anglicanism.

At which university did Eliot take his BA and MA before studying philosophy in Paris?

He later went back to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit, and wrote a doctoral thesis on F. H. Bradley that he never returned to defend.

A 1914 scholarship took Eliot to which Oxford college, which he left after a year?

So many Americans were there that the junior common room debated a motion abhorring 'the Americanization of Oxford'.

Which American poet, met in London in 1914, declared Eliot "worth watching" and promoted his early career?

Pound got Prufrock into Poetry magazine and later cut The Waste Land down to size.

Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in June 1915. What was her job when they met?

Introduced by Scofield Thayer, they married at Hampstead Register Office less than three months later.

Which philosopher took an interest in Vivienne while the newlywed Eliots stayed in his flat?

Eliot later wrote that he had persuaded himself he loved Vivienne so as to burn his boats and stay in England.

What happened to Vivienne in 1938?

She stayed at Northumberland House until her death in 1947; the Eliots had separated in 1933 but never divorced.

The 1984 play about the marriage, later a 1994 film, is called what?

Willem Dafoe played Eliot and Miranda Richardson played Vivienne in Brian Gilbert's film.

Which future poet laureate was among Eliot's pupils when he taught French and Latin at Highgate School?

Eliot also taught at the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe and lectured at evening classes for extra money.

From 1917 Eliot worked on foreign accounts at which London bank?

He stayed eight years, writing The Waste Land during a period of sick leave from the job.

In 1925 Eliot left banking to become a director of which publishing firm?

There he published Auden, Spender and Ted Hughes; his second wife Valerie was his secretary there.

In 1927 Eliot converted from Unitarianism to what?

He called himself 'classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion'.

Eliot's 1,131 letters to Emily Hale were sealed at Princeton until which year, fifty years after both died?

He destroyed her letters to him and lodged his own account of the relationship at Harvard, to be opened at the same time.

In January 1957 the 68-year-old Eliot married Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. What had she been?

She had admired him since hearing John Gielgud read Journey of the Magi at 14, and later edited his letters.

Eliot died in January 1965 in London of what?

He was cremated at Golders Green and his ashes taken to East Coker in Somerset.

Eliot's ashes rest in the church at East Coker, Somerset. Why that village?

A plaque quotes his poem of the same name; a floor stone in Poets' Corner followed in 1967.

'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' was first published in June 1915 in which magazine?

Pound, the magazine's overseas editor, talked founder Harriet Monroe into printing it; critics thought it outlandish.

Although Prufrock seems middle-aged, how old was Eliot when he wrote most of the poem?

Its structure owes much to his reading of Dante, and it alludes to Hamlet and the French Symbolists.

The name Prufrock may have come from what in Eliot's boyhood St. Louis?

The Prufrock-Litton Company filled a downtown block; Eliot claimed he never recalled where the name came from.

Eliot's first collection, published in 1917, was called what?

The British and American editions differed by one poem: 'Ode' was swapped for 'Hysteria'.

How many lines long is The Waste Land?

It appeared in October 1922 in Eliot's own magazine The Criterion and in November in The Dial in the US.

The Waste Land is divided into how many sections?

The first is 'The Burial of the Dead' and the last is 'What the Thunder Said'.

The Waste Land is dedicated to its editor as il miglior fabbro, meaning what?

Pound had cut a much longer manuscript down to the published version.

Eliot completed the first draft of The Waste Land while under a doctor's care in which city?

He had been granted three months' leave from the bank for a nervous disorder and first convalesced at Margate.

What title did Eliot originally consider for The Waste Land?

The final title came from Jessie Weston's book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance.

What does the Sanskrit word repeated three times at the end of The Waste Land mean?

Eliot's Harvard studies in Sanskrit and Indian philosophy run through his work.

Why did Eliot add several pages of notes to the first book edition of The Waste Land?

Horace Liveright of Boni & Liveright had bid for the poem at a dinner in Paris with Pound, Eliot and James Joyce.

Which press, run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, issued the first British edition of The Waste Land?

The Woolfs were friends of Eliot's and hand-set the type themselves.

The Criterion, the magazine Eliot edited from 1922 to 1939, was originally financed by whom?

She read the first issue, which contained The Waste Land, and wrote three letters of criticism.

The two epigraphs of 'The Hollow Men' (1925) allude to Guy Fawkes and which literary character?

The poem is famous for its ending about the way the world ends.

Ash-Wednesday (1930) is often called Eliot's what?

Built on Dante's Purgatorio, it traces the move from spiritual barrenness towards hope.

'Journey of the Magi' (1927) was one of five Eliot contributions to which series of Faber pamphlets?

Edward McKnight Kauffer illustrated it; the series ran to 38 pamphlets by various authors.

Which of the Four Quartets was published first, in the 1936 Collected Poems?

It grew out of material cut from Murder in the Cathedral and is named for a Cotswold manor Eliot visited with Emily Hale.

Which classical element is loosely associated with Little Gidding in the Four Quartets?

Burnt Norton is air, East Coker earth and The Dry Salvages water; the last three were written during the Blitz.

Little Gidding, the last of the Quartets, takes its name from a village that was home to what?

Nicholas Ferrar founded the community in 1626, and Charles I visited it three times.

Murder in the Cathedral (1935) dramatises the killing of which archbishop?

The verse drama covers the days before his 1170 martyrdom in Canterbury Cathedral, with four Tempters visiting him.

Eliot's play The Cocktail Party won the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play. It is based on which Greek drama?

It premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949 with Alec Guinness.

Eliot's play The Family Reunion (1939) transplants which Greek myth to an English country house?

Michael Redgrave played the haunted Harry at the Westminster Theatre; Eliot himself came to think the play a failure.

Under what pen name did Eliot send cat poems to his godchildren in the 1930s?

Ezra Pound had nicknamed him Possum; the poems were collected in 1939 with cover drawings by Eliot himself.

Which Andrew Lloyd Webber musical is based on Eliot's 1939 book of light verse for children?

Andrew Lloyd Webber began setting the poems in 1977 as a songwriting exercise.

Cats' most famous song, 'Memory', was written by Trevor Nunn using lines from which Eliot poem?

Its lyrics are not from the cat book at all; other lines came from 'Preludes'.

Cats opened on Broadway in 1982 at which theatre?

It won Best Musical at both the Olivier and Tony Awards and had grossed $3.5 billion worldwide by 2012.

Which 1919 Eliot essay sets out his 'impersonal theory', likening the poet's mind to a catalyst?

It first appeared in The Egoist and was collected in The Sacred Wood in 1920.

Sweeney Agonistes, published in 1932, was subtitled 'Fragments of' what?

Eliot never finished it; it now sits among his 'Unfinished Poems'.

Which honour, inscribed on his Poets' Corner stone, did Eliot hold?

The stone, laid in 1967, also quotes Little Gidding.

Which critic's 1996 book most forcefully accused Eliot of antisemitism, citing 'Gerontion'?

The debate over those lines has never really closed.

Who was the American publisher of Eliot's The Waste Land, met at a Paris dinner with James Joyce?

Boni & Liveright published it as a book in December 1922; The Dial had given it a $2,000 prize.

Which of these Eliot poems from the 1939 collection features a railway cat?

Macavity is the mystery cat, Growltiger a bravo cat and Bustopher Jones the cat about town.

Which of his works did Eliot regard as his masterpiece, the one that most led to his Nobel Prize?

His nights as an air-raid warden in the Blitz power the poem, in which he imagines meeting Dante during the bombing.

How did Eliot describe himself in a famous three-part declaration of 1928?

He became a churchwarden at St Stephen's, Gloucester Road, and a life member of the Society of King Charles the Martyr.

Eliot's father was president of a company making what product in St. Louis?

Henry Ware Eliot ran the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company; Eliot's mother Charlotte wrote poetry and worked as a social worker.

What childhood condition kept Eliot out of many physical activities?

He later said he was fortunate to have been born in St. Louis rather than Boston, New York or London.

Eliot's 1916 Harvard doctoral dissertation dealt with the philosophy of which thinker?

He never returned to America for the oral examination, so the doctorate was never awarded.

Which student, met in Eliot's prep year at Milton Academy, later published The Waste Land?

Thayer's magazine The Dial carried the poem; Conrad Aiken became a lifelong friend from Harvard days.

Which 1934 pageant play did Eliot write for the benefit of churches in the Diocese of London?

Its producer E. Martin Browne then commissioned Murder in the Cathedral for the 1935 Canterbury Festival.

Where was Eliot a visiting scholar while writing The Cocktail Party?

The Broadway production went on to win the 1950 Tony Award for Best Play.

Eliot's first published poem, 'A Fable for Feasters', ran in 1905 in which school's magazine?

It was written as a school exercise; the school was the boys' prep division of Washington University.