T.S. Eliot

Anglo-American poet and critic — author of The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943), Nobel laureate, and the most influential literary critic of the 20th century.

The Waste Land as the modernist landmark: Eliot's 433-line poem (1922) — collaging multiple languages, literary traditions, and voices to capture postwar European spiritual desolation — redefined what poetry could do and reshaped the canon. His critical essays ('Tradition and the Individual Talent,' 'The Metaphysical Poets') established the New Criticism framework that dominated Anglo-American literary study for decades. The concept of the 'objective correlative' (a set of objects or situations that evoke specific emotions without stating them) became a key tool of modernist poetics.