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Thomas Stearns Eliot Modernist Anglo - American poet, dramatist, literary critic (1888 - 1965) He was born in St. Louis in 1888 to a family with prominent New England roots. He studied at Harvard, in 1906, was accepted into the literary circles, where he favoured 16th- and 17th-century poetry, the Italian Renaissance (particularly Dante), Eastern religion, and philosophy. The greatest influence on him was the 19th-century French Symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stephene Mallarme, and Eliot's favourite, …

…of the modern world. - How could you define the modernist feature of the poem? Eliot helped to set the modernist fashion for blending references to the classics with the most sordid type of realism, then expressing the blend in majestic language which seems to mock the subject. Vocal fragmentation and allusiveness, a precision of imagery borrowed from the 19th-century French Symbolists, disapprove of the sterility of the modern world, and a dry, self-conscious wit.