T.S. Eliot's Symbolism T.S. Eliot is perhaps the leading poet of this century. He was an American who lived much of his life in England. T.S. Eliot is classified in libraries as both an American poet and British poet. He was also an important literary critic, editing a literary magazine and writing extensively on poetry. Eliot's significance is that he never compromised with the audience. Eliot used complex symbolism to represent his ideas and views from a poets stand point. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888 to a family with a prominent New England background. Eliot was educated at Harvard and joined many literary circles. The Nobel lectures wrote in Eliot's biography that he was influenced by French symbolists of the 19th-century. This influenced his later works as Eliot himself used symbolic literary references. This would brand Eliot as a modernist. This is why Eliot's works posses intellectual literary genius that is difficult to understand because of the symbolic language referenced (Nobel Lectures). Eliot is known in his writing to assume the mask of a narrator. He concealed much about himself while expressing certain philosophical ideas. Eliot's works possessed a particular intellectual style that often placed distance between the reader and the poet. To better understand Eliot one would need to examine external material. This is because many things in Eliot's writing had an obscured reference. In “The Waste Land” Eliot makes reference to places with which he had personal knowledge. Understanding his life and the places he lived would be the only method to better understand these references. In this particular example, Eliot is an American living in a banking district in London. Obscure references like these would create a gap between the reader and poet. Knowing that Eliot was living abroad might convey to the