It’s the birthday of T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), whose works such as “The Waste Land” and Four Quartets established him as the greatest poet of the 20th century, though emphatically not, it must be admitted, the most cheerful.

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the sixth child of parents who were actually transplanted Boston Brahmins. He was educated with a liberal and lavish hand, going from Smith Academy to Milton Academy to Harvard; he was already writing poetry by the time he was at Smith, and, more importantly, destroying his poems in fits of gloom, thus foreshadowing his own greatness. After Harvard he studied in France, then Harvard again, and then, with WWI interrupting the completion of his PhD, on to Oxford, which he hated. Eliot famously wrote to the American poet Conrad Aiken, “I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books, and hideous pictures on the walls. Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead.”

(Who could blame him? Children and books. Blech.)

Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, the same year that Eliot’s poem “The Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published in the journal Poetry—Eliot’s first professionally published poem. Eliot and Vivienne had a disastrous marriage, competing to see who could be more miserable, sickly, and self-absorbed. Eliot wrote that their marriage “…brought the state of mind out of which came ‘The Waste Land.’” Vivienne was ultimately committed to an asylum, and ten years after her death in 1947, Eliot, aged 68, married Esme Valerie Fletcher, aged 30. They had a happy marriage, suggesting that whenever possible one should marry someone 38 years younger.

In the meantime, Eliot completely revolutionized English poetry and literary criticism. As his BFF Ezra Pound put it upon reading “Prufrock,” “[Eliot] has actually trained himself *and* modernized himself *on his own*.” “Prufrock” was the first Modernist masterpiece; “The Waste Land” spoke to people’s disillusionment after the Great War; and his greatest work, Four Quartets (published together in 1943), a meditation on the nature of time, eternity, and Eliot’s Christian beliefs, nailed Eliot the Nobel Prize in 1948.

On a lighter note, Eliot’s book of light verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, originally published in 1939, has since been delightfully illustrated by Edward Gorey and led to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical Cats.

Eliot died of emphysema at the age of 76.

Have a fine Thursday, find a way to mitigate the infinite gloom of this rainy, elegiac day, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.