I'm going to begin my research with the background of T.S. Eliot. 

 Thomas Stearns Eliot was born September 26, 1888, and died January 4, 1965. He was an American-English author, a critic, a playwright, and an editor and publisher. Thomas was the youngest of six children and was a very respected child. World War I is when Eliot began his early poetry. His first volume, Prufrock and Other Observations caught people’s attention and became a huge controversy during this time. I find this interesting because now we rarely hear about people discussing or fighting over a recent poem. Instead people are fighting over something that happened on twitter or talking about the most recent scandal in Hollywood. In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Eliot shows many rhythms, precision, and discontinuity. When we read this poem in class awhile back I remember being very intrigued by Eliot’s style. I liked his use of irony and found the poem very interesting to analyze.

 Eliot was the editor of the Egoist and during this time was when he began his critical careers. He wrote two very influential pieces in 1919 called “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet and His Problems. He then began to write critical essays and tried to help poets, critics, and other figures that may have helped him. Then in 1921, Eliot wrote The Waste Land, which became the most argumentative poem during that century.

Thomas Stearns Eliot. Encyclopedia of World Biography. Detroit: Gale, 1998. Gale
Biography In Context. Web. 28 Mar. 2012.