T. S. Eliot Born: Modernism's Defining Poet
T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888, studied at Harvard, and moved to England in 1914, never really moving back. The Waste Land appeared in 1922 and nobody knew quite what to make of it — 433 lines of fragmented voices, multiple languages, no conventional narrative, footnotes that raised more questions than they answered. It became the defining poem of literary modernism anyway. He won the Nobel Prize in 1948 and was awarded the Order of Merit by King George VI the same day. He wrote Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats in 1939 as light verse for his godchildren. That book became the musical Cats.
September 26, 1888
138 years ago
What Else Happened on September 26
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His father's body was still warm when William Rufus — red-faced, short-tempered, never married — rode hard for Winchester to seize the royal treasury before any…
Empress Matilda was trapped inside Oxford Castle while King Stephen's army ringed the city. The siege started in September and ran into December. When the Thame…
The Golden Bull of 1212 was Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II essentially paying a political debt. Ottokar I of Bohemia had backed Frederick in his power struggle…
Frisian peasants crushed the invading army of Count William IV of Holland at the Battle of Warns, ending Holland’s attempts to annex their territory. By defendi…
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