Class X Unit II The World of Mystery-Skimbleshanks: The Railway Cat (Poem)

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot OM  was a publisher, playwright, literary and social critic and "one of the twentieth century's major poets. Born in the United States on September 26, 1888,  he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.
From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was fourteen under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing, and he destroyed them. His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905.Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard University's student magazine. He also published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King". The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration of Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis. 
Following graduation, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer, who would later publish The Waste Land. He studied philosophy at Harvard College from 1906 to 1909, earning his bachelor's degree after three years, instead of the usual four. Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908, when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899).
After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris, where from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. 
 In 1915 he taught English at Birkbeck, University of London.
Eliot attracted widespread attention for his poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), which is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement. It was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.
Awards
Order of Merit (awarded by King George VI (United Kingdom), 1948)
Nobel Prize in Literature "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry" (Stockholm, 1948)
Officier de la Legion d'Honneur (1951)
Hanseatic Goethe Prize (Hamburg, 1955)
Dante Medal (Florence, 1959)
Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1960)
Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964)
Thirteen honorary doctorates (including Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and Harvard)
Tony Award in 1950 for Best Play: The Broadway production of The Cocktail Party
Two posthumous Tony Awards (1983) for his poems used in the musical Cats
Eliot College of the University of Kent, England, named after him
Celebrated on commemorative postage stamps
A star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame