Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri but lived much of his adult life in England where he eventually became a 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" (1910–11), 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 in form. Considered one of the inventors of modern poetry, Eliot wrote in free verse. Free verse is a flexible form of poetry without regular patterns of rhyme, rhythm, or division into stanzas. It usually has irregular line lengths and, like prose, suits the rhythm and length of the lines to what is being said. 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.