Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet, critic, publisher, was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888 and died in London on 4 January 1965. In 1922, he published The Waste Land, a poem that exerted the single greatest influence on English poetry in the last century, and whose centenary will be marked by publication and events throughout the coming year.
Listen to Edoardo Ballerini read the opening lines from The Waste Land, taken from the audio book of the Centenary Edition available from 6 January 2022.