Art, literature & culture

Death of T. S. Eliot

4 January 1965

T. S. Eliot died on 4 January 1965 in Kensington, aged 76. An American-born poet and critic who became a British subject in 1927, Eliot was one of the central figures of literary modernism. His poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock appeared in 1915, and The Waste Land in 1922 expressed the disillusionment of the postwar generation in a fragmentary, allusive style. He later wrote the religious meditations of Four Quartets and the verse drama Murder in the Cathedral. He worked as an editor at the publisher Faber and Faber, promoting younger poets, and wrote the whimsical Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, which inspired the musical Cats. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

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