T.S. Eliot House

This brick edifice is the former home of Thomas Sterns Eliot, better known as T.S. Eliot (1888 - 1965), the 20th-century Modernist poet. In addition to spending his formative years in St. Louis, he also spent summers with his family at an inn by the coast in Massachusetts. The T.S. Eliot house on Westminster Avenue was built in 1904 by his father, the architect and builder Henry Ware Eliot. At the time, Henry Eliot was the president of a brick company in St. Louis, which produced high-quality bricks (in a city largely built from brick). It has been noted that the family moved to the new home in the affluent Central West End neighborhood after vacating an earlier property on Locust Street. At the time, the previous neighborhood contained several buildings which had gradually fallen into relative disrepair, and it is thought this might have contributed to some of the imagery later used in Eliot's poem, The Wasteland (1922). In addition to becoming recognized as an esteemed poet, Eliot was also a playwright, essayist, literary critic, editor, and publisher. At the forefront of the Modernist movement, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948.

Thomas Sterns Eliot was born on in St. Louis on September 26, 1888. At the age of sixteen, he moved with his family to a home in the Central West End, an affluent residential neighborhood located near Forest Park, west of downtown His father, Henry Ware Eliot, built the home himself in 1904. In addition to working as an architect and builder, Henry Ware Eliot was the president of a St. Louis-based brick company, which was responsible for producing many of the bricks used throughout the city. As a result, the materials used to construct the building were considered high quality, and the construction of the home was flawless.

Only a year after moving into this new family home on Westminster Avenue, T.S. Eliot relocated to Boston to attend prep school, before attending Harvard University. He planned to pursue a PhD, but his studies were interrupted by World War I. Following the conclusion of his formal education, T.S. Eliot taught Latin and French at a secondary school and then had a brief career as a bank clerk. Around the same time, he also formed a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, as Eliot himself had begun to write in a Modernist style. Both Pound and Eliot sought to break with convention by moving away from the earlier emphasis on Romanticism in literature. Eliot's first acclaimed work was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915).

Eliot went on to become not only a renowned poet, but also a playwright, literary critic, essayist, editor, and publisher. A recognized leader in the Modernist movement, his most famous works remain The Wasteland (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Told through a series of vignettes, The Wasteland expressed Eliot's disenchantment and disgust following World War I, as well as conveying a sense of muddled hopelessness in what he perceived as secularized city life.

For his contributions to the Modernist movement, Eliot was awarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He also produced a book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1936), which was later adapted into the Broadway musical, Cats (1981), by Andrew Lloyd Webber, with approval from Eliot's widow, Valerie Fletcher, who acted as the literary executor for his estate. Eliot died on January 4, 1965, in London, England. The T.S. Eliot house in St. Louis's Central West End is listed on the Register of Historic Places as a City Landmark.

Young, Glynn. Finding Eliot in St. Louis, Tweetspeakpoetry. September 1st, 2015. Accessed September 4th, 2022. https://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2015/09/01/finding-eliot-in-st-louis/.

T.S. Eliot House, T.S. Eliot Foundation. Accessed September 4th, 2022. https://tseliot.com/foundation/ts-eliot-house/.

Davies, Hugh Alistair. T.S. Eliot - Later Poetry and Plays, Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed September 11th, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/T-S-Eliot/Later-poetry-and-plays.

T.S. Eliot House - City Landmark #59, St. Louis.gov. Accessed September 4th, 2022. https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/government/departments/planning/cultural-resources/city-landmarks/TS-Eliot-House.cfm

Crawford, Robert. Young Eliot: From St. Louis to the Waste Land . New York City, New York. Macmillan, 2015.