Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died on 4 January 1965 in London. In the course of a life that crossed the Atlantic both literally and imaginatively, he became one of the defining writers of literary modernism: a poet whose fractured early works gave memorable form to urban loneliness and postwar disillusionment, a critic whose arguments reshaped English studies, an edit…
“The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.”
Neighbourhood:
American Poets, Dramatic Poets, Edwardian Poets, Modernist Poets, Symbolist Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Charles Harding Firth was born in Sheffield on 16 March 1857, into a family whose prosperity, civic conscience, and intellectual ambitions helped to shape his future. His father, Mark Firth, was a prominent steel manufacturer, philanthropist, and public figure whose wealth was tied to the industrial transformation of nineteenth-century Sheffield. Yet the younger Firth’s enduring interests lay not in the furnaces and…
“One half of his business is the discovery of the truth, and the other half its representation.”
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
