Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, but lived much of his adult life in England and eventually became an English citizen. Educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, Eliot steeped himself in philosophy and linguistics. He wrote his first major poems, including "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1910–1911), while he was a student in Paris. Eliot's early poems established the major themes of his body of work: the problem of isolation from other people and from God in modern urban life and the search for purpose and meaning. Eliot returned to these themes again and again in poems such as The Waste Land (1922), a long narrative poem published as a book; "The Hollow Men" (1927); and "Ash Wednesday" (1930).

Eliot's influence on twentieth-century poetry was tremendous, particularly in the years between the world wars. His poems departed radically from nineteenth-century poetry, not only in theme but also in form. Considered one of the inventors of modern poetry, Eliot wrote poetry that consisted of a series of images without a narrator's voice to connect or make sense of them. The reader is left to absorb the images and, through their cumulative effect, sense the idea the poet is trying to convey. Many of Eliot's major poems, including The Waste Land and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," develop through their images the theme of the decay of culture and society in the modern world. In addition to being one of the century's leading poets, Eliot was a distinguished literary critic, editor, and dramatist. In 1948, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.