Displacement was a recurrent feature of Thomas Stearns Eliot’s life, from his birth on 26 September 1888 in St Louis, Missouri, to the April day in 1965 when the urn containing his ashes was deposited in the church of the Somerset village of East Coker, the place from which his ancestor Andrew Eliot had set out for New England in the late seventeenth century. The St Louis of his childhood was an increasingly grimy commercial city; but its frontier-town days were still alive in the memories of many inhabitants, and it was that town that the poet’s grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, of Boston Brahmin descent and inspired by Unitarian zeal, had set out to civilize. The New England connection remained important to the Eliots, wh

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First published 30 March 2001

Citation: Thormahlen, Marianne. "T. S. Eliot". The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 March 2001.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4861, accessed 20 November 2009.]