Where is the famous poet T.S. Eliot buried?

He was born in Missouri but in accordance with his wishes had his ashes taken to St Michael and All Angels, East Coker. It is a circumstance worth explaining with regard to our latest ‘Legend’ Thomas Stearns Eliot, or T.S. Eliot as he’s more commonly known.

East Coker was the village from which Eliot’s ancestors emigrated to America, hence his determination his ashes would end up there. There’s a wall plaque summing things up rather pithily in the poet’s own words: ‘In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning’. Taken from Eliot’s poem East Coker’ it speaks perhaps of life being providential and mapped out from the start.

Influenced by fellow-poet Ezra Pound, Eliot became one of us, hunkering down in England where he became naturalised in 1927, also baptised and confirmed the same year.

Having dabbled at teaching, then sticking at banking for longer, he became a director of a publishing firm. With Pound’s encouragement his first poetry collection was published in 1917, then two further outpourings were published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, including The Waste Land (1922).

Eliot was also an editor, as The Waste Land appeared in the first issue of The Criterion, a quarterly he edited from its launch to its end early in 1939. The publication was a mirror on the ideas, political and religious, and literary genres prevailing between the wars.

Eliot moved to an Anglo-Catholic position within the Anglican movement, his religious epic Murder in the Cathedral (1935) about Thomas Becket’s denouement a revival of the verse play and testament to his Catholic devotion.

His magnum opus was Four Quartets (1944), where East Coker featured as number two. Eliot visited the Somerset village in 1937 to see where his ancestor Andrew Eliot lived before departing for the New World in 1669.

After delivering what is held to be his greatest philosophical poetry Eliot had a bash at dramas, embracing the less spiritual world of West End plays.

Eliot could be a controversial and provocative literary critic, a man heavily influenced by World War One, which saw the end of Romantic poetry and a new movement, of which Eliot and Pound were prime movers, which was more realistic and earthy, related to modern life, and free of idiom and cliché.

Eliot’s talent and influence were recognised in 1948 when he was awarded the OM (Order of Merit) and Nobel Literature Prize.