T. S. Eliot died on 4 January 1965 in London, England. At his death he was widely recognized as the greatest English poet of his time. And his most famous poem The Waste Land has good claim to be the greatest of poems about London. But Eliot had been born a citizen of the United States of America, and much of his intellectual formation had been in the philosophy department of Harvard University. Moreover, although he died as a communicant of the Anglican Church and is buried at East Coker in Somerset, the village of his ancestors, he had been raised in the Unitarian church of the United States.

Nearly forty years after his death he occupies a much more uncomfortable position. His conservative politics are uncongenial to an academy dominated by liberals, his belief in a Europe defined above all by its Latin culture seems to make little sense in a world in which the study of Latin is no longer central to the curriculum, and his anti-Semitism and misogyny are now less easily discounted than in the period when he was alive.

But his poetry, although very modest in quantity, remains one of the great artistic triumphs of the English language. In his ironic accounts of adolescent desire in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady’ he performs masculine self-doubt with a pathos and wit that has yet to be surpassed in poem, book or song. But these early poems can seem like mere exercises beside the astonishing achievements of ‘Gerontion’ and The Waste Land, poems that defined a generation and that broke the mould of English verse to allow a symphony of despairing voices to bear witness to the destruction of Europe. Finally in Four Quartets he forged an original form and a compelling tone to hymn both religious belief and national destiny as England faced defeat at the hands of Germany. The confident conclusion of Four Quartets that ‘the fire and the rose’ would be one brought his life as a poet to an end when he was only 54, almost coincidentally with the entry of the United States into the Second World War.