Thomas Stearns (T. S.) Eliot was born into a large and prosperous family September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri. Eliot grew up with frequent visits to Massachusetts, where his father built a house overlooking Gloucester harbor, and entered Harvard as a philosophy student in 1906. His greatest influence there was "new humanist" philosopher Irving Babbitt, who helped Eliot form the basis for his philosophical theories.

In 1910, Eliot moved to Paris and then to Munich to study French and German literature, but he soon reenrolled at Harvard to study Eastern philosophy. With the outbreak of World War I, he began pursuing a doctoral thesis on F. H. Bradley while on a traveling fellowship to Merton College, Oxford. He stayed in Oxford until his marriage in 1915 to Vivien Haigh-Wood.

By this time, Eliot had written some of his most famous poetry, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Ezra...