Thomas S. Eliot: The Poet of Purgatory

The work of the poet, playwright, and critic, Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965), which had a profound influence on contemporary Western culture, is woven from contradictions, just like his biography. Belonging to the American elite, he did not fit into his native country and moved to England, where he spent the rest of his days. Regarded as an extreme modernist, he constantly turned to the distant past and the faith lost by his contemporaries. Gaining fame for the elitism and complexity of his poems, he readily included topical themes and conversational speech in them. The first detailed biography of Eliot in Russian clearly demonstrates how closely his life and work are connected, forming a kind of circle to which the poet himself dedicated the famous line – “in my beginning is my end.”