Modernist Poet TS Eliot

This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.

TS Eliot "The Wasteland"


Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of an old New England family. He was educated at Harvard and did graduate work in philosophy at the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Merton College, Oxford. He settled in England, where he was for a time a schoolmaster and a bank clerk, and eventually literary editor for the publishing house Faber & Faber, of which he later became a director. He founded and, during the seventeen years of its publication (1922-1939), edited the exclusive and influential literary journal Criterion. In 1927, Eliot became a British citizen and about the same time entered the Anglican Church .
(follow the hyperlink to the rest of the biography)

"The Wasteland" is TS Eliot's most culturally significant poem (I said so!) however, it's a challenge. This hyperlink provides extensive notes on the poem.

Virginia Woolf Biography

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) hyperlink to the [extended biography]

Virginia Woolf, born in London on January 25, 1882, was the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and Leslie Stephen, a literary critic and founder of the Dictionary of National Biography . Woolf, growing up at the family estate at Hyde Park Gate, was educated at home by her father. Despite her protected childhood, Woolf had a life infused with tragedy. Her mother died when she was in her early teens. Stella Duckworth, Woolf's half sister, died two years later. Leslie Stephen, her father, suffered a slow death from cancer. When Woolf's brother Toby died in 1906, she suffered a prolonged mental breakdown. Following the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved with her sister, Vanessa, and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury, which would laster become central to the activities of the Bloomsbury Group, an elite, influential society that helped place Woolf at the center of literary society.