ELIOT, T. S.
(1888–1965)
ELIOT, T. S. (26 September 1888–4 January 1965; born Thomas Steams E.). Where and when was Eliot avant-garde? Not in his pseudo-juvenile Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939), or in the solemn footnotes at the end of The Waste Land (1922). One could make a case for Sweeney Agonistes (1932) as a conceptual play, because it cannot be staged as is; but to my mind, Eliot’s greatest departure was publication, even in his initial Collected Poems (1930), of several works that are explicitly…