He lived in London from 1915. His first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations 1917, introduced new verse forms and rhythms; subsequent major poems were The Waste Land 1922 and The Hollow Men 1925. For children he published Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats 1939. His plays include Murder in the Cathedral 1935 and The Cocktail Party 1949. His critical works include The Sacred Wood 1920. Nobel Prize for Literature 1948. Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, and was educated at Harvard, in France at the Sorbonne, and in the UK at Oxford. He settled in London 1915 and became a British subject 1927. He was for a time a bank clerk, later lecturing and entering publishing at Faber & Faber. As editor of the highly influential Criterion literary magazine 1922-39, he was responsible for a critical re-evaluation of metaphysical poetry and Jacobean drama, and wrote perceptively about such European poets as Dante, Charles Baudelaire, and Jules Laforgue. Prufrock and Other Observations expressed the disillusionment of the generation affected by World War I and caused a sensation with its experimental form and rhythms. His reputation was established by the desolate modernity of The Waste Land. The Hollow Men continued on the same note, but Ash Wednesday 1930 revealed the change in religious attitude that had led him to join the Church of England 1927. Among his other works are Four Quartets 1943, a religious sequence in which he seeks the eternal reality, and the poetic dramas Murder in the Cathedral (about Thomas à Becket); The Cocktail Party; The Confidential Clerk 1953; and The Elder Statesman 1958. His collection Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats was used for the popular English composer Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical Cats 1981. Eliot's critical works, which include The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 1933, The Idea of a Christian Society 1940, and Notes toward the Definition of Culture 1948, are conservative in tone, emphasizing the traditional values of ritual and community. He coined two important literary critical terms: dissociation of sensibility and objective correlative.
