Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece and it is the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Giddings (1942). Each has five sections. Although they resist easy characterization, each begins with a rumination on the geographical location of its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation to the human condition. Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements air, earth, water, and fire.Outline Research Paper
Thesis Statement: T.S. Eliot wrote poems that expressed his negative views of life, the human race, and the world around him by personifying"
I’m not sure what this means: "comparing and highlighting the negative facts about them. The thesis statement should be able to stand alone so you would have to elaborate T.S. Eliot wrote poems that expressed his negative views of life, the human race, and the world around him by personifying and intensifying specific aspects and metaphors in his writing.
Background Information
Thomas Stearns Eliot (26 Sept. 1888-4 Jan. 1965), poet, critic, and editor, was born Thomas Stearns Eliot in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Henry Ware Eliot, president of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company, and Charlotte Champed Stearns, a former teacher, an energetic social work volunteer at the Humanity Club of St. Louis, and an amateur poet with a taste for Emerson. Eliot was the youngest of seven children, born when his parents were prosperous and secure in their mid-forties (his father had recovered from an earlier business failure) and his siblings were half grown. Afflicted with a congenital double hernia, he was in the constant eye of his mother and five older sisters. His paternal grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, had been a protégé of William Ellery Channing, the dean of American Unitarianism. William Eliot graduated from Harvard Divinity School then moved toward the frontier. He founded the Unitarian church in St. Louis and soon became a pillar of the then southwestern city's religious and civic life. Because of William's ties to St. Louis, the Eliot family chose to remain in their urban Locust Street home long after the area had run down and their peers had moved to the suburbs. Left in the care of his Irish nurse, Annie Dunne, who sometimes took him to Catholic Mass, Eliot knew both the city's muddy streets and its exclusive drawing rooms. He attended Smith Academy in St. Louis until he was sixteen. During his last year at Smith he visited the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and was so taken with the fair's native villages that he wrote short stories about primitive life for the Smith Academy Record. In 1905 he departed for a year at Milton Academy outside of Boston, preparatory to following his older brother Henry to Harvard. Eliot’s attending Harvard seems to have been a foregone conclusion. His father and mother, jealously guarding their connection to Boston's Unitarian establishment, brought the family back to the north shore every summer, and in 1896 built a substantial house at Eastern Point, in Gloucester, Massachusetts. As a boy, Eliot foraged for crabs and became an accomplished sailor, trading the Mississippi River in the warm months for the rocky shoals of Cape Ann. He Died In London.

Accomplishments
Eliot wrote poetry, plays and critical essays. “Prufrock and Other Observations” was his first published collection. His famous poem, “The Waste Land,” details a soul’s search for redemption. “The Sacred Wood” which is a collection of essays about poetry. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. When the prize was presented to him, Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, described Eliot’s work can never be denied that in his period he has been an eminent poser of questions, with a masterly gift for finding the apt wording, both in the language of poetry and in the defense of ideas in essay form. Eliot married Valerie Fletcher in 1956 and experienced the peaceful home life that had eluded him during his first marriage. During the later years of his life, Eliot worked as the director of Faber & Faber, a London publishing house.
He continued to write on his own, but ceased writing poetry, focusing instead on plays and literary essays. Eliot’s poems have an honored position in academia, but his lighter work grabbed a foothold in popular culture in 1981, when composer Andrew Lloyd Weber adapted Eliot’s collection “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” into the blockbuster musical “Cats.”

Books
Book of Practical Cats
In 1930, Eliot published a book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats ("Old Possum" was Ezra Pound's nickname for him). This first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover. In 1954, the composer Alan Hawthorne set six of the poems for speaker and orchestra, in a work entitled Practical Cats. After Eliot's death, the book was adapted as the basis of the musical, Cats, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, first produced in London's West End in 1981 and opening on Broadway the following year.