T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) was born one year before Hopkins died. He was born in Missouri, parents were Unitarians, but moved to England as a young man and later became an impassioned Anglophile and British citizen. When he wrote his famous "Wasteland" in the early l920's, with its images fresh from the horrors of World War I, one could assume him to be an agnostic with a nihilistic view and not a lot of hope.
By the late l920's, however, he was associating with Anglican priests. "On June 29, l927, having completed his training, he was baptized and received into the C of E at Finstock Church in the Cotswolds.It was, as were so many of the important events in Eliot's life, done in great secrecy. The front doors of the church were locked and a verger was posted on guard at the vestry. 'the precautions were necessary to avoid anyone being embarrassed by the sight of an adult at the baptism font."

   In l930 Eliot wrote his poem Ash Wednesday, which depicted a person who had already turned his back on the world but was not quite ready yet to be able to pray and embrace conventional Christianity.
Eliot had consolidated his place in British society by marrying Vivian HaightWood, but the marriage shortly became shaken by Vivien's precarious mental health. At the dinner table of Virginia Wolff, Ottoline Morrell and others, Vivian was embarrassing her husband, who took much stock in being civil and proper.Vivian had hysterical tendencies. On one occasion when a woman of society called to her by name on Oxford Street, she called back "I'm not Vivian Eliot. She's this horrid woman who looks like me and is always getting me into trouble." The Eliots, when they traveled, were now always taking separate rooms, and Eliot had very little social life because of his wife.The family doctor had given a rather unflattering diagnosis- moral insanity! He saw that he would have to divorce her, but confrontation was not his strong point. He was offered a year's visiting professorship at Harvard in 1932-l933, and he saw this as a chance to escape from the family flat. He knew he was leaving when his wife accompanied him down to the ship where he was to take off. While in American, he had his solicitors serve her the separation papers. She remained in denial, eagerly awaiting his return. He did not return to their home; she thought he had been lost at sea, but he had taken up residence first at a boarding house in Kensington, then in rooms at St. Stephen's rectory in the same neighborhood, where he lived for several years. Vivien made attempt after attempt to see him, going to his place of business at Faber and Faber the renouned publishers on Russell Square, where his secretary would deny he was there and he would sneak out the back and absent himself for several hours. She finally saw him one time when he was giving a lecture on a book; he said something like "Oh, how do you do?" like she were just another member of the audience- and for once she did not make a scene. She once put an ad in the London Times--"Tom Eliot please return home." In l936 her diaries stop and the next we learn she has died after 11 years at Northumberland House, a private mental hospital in Finsbury Park, N. London.           
 

  The 20th c's most famous poet - never lived in sumptuous surroundings.After the war, in l946, he set up housekeeping with a literary man John Hayward, at 19 Carlyle Mansions. Eliot's study and bedroom were 2 cheerless rooms at the back of the building. The bedroom was lit by a bare electric lightbulb; an ebony crucifix hung over his single bed. Hayward, a younger man, was in a wheelchair, and Eliot often sacrificed his  time taking the very ociable Hayward to a party or pushing him and his wheelchair through a park.
  This living arrangement may or may not have emboldened a young literary critic to interpret The Wasteland as having homosexual overtones, suggesting that the poet had been mourning a young man who had drowned. Eliot and his soliciters demanded destruction of the remainder of the magazines where the critical article appeared.On Jan. 10, l957, at 6:l5 in the morning and still quite dark, Eliot slipped out of the flat, met his much younger secretary--she still called him Mr. Eliot-at St. Barnabas Church in Addison Rd. Kensington (ages 30, 68 respectively) and married her. He had not previously discussed this plan with his roommate of 11 years who was in a wheelchair. He had not told his close friends, Emily Hale and Mary Trevelyn. The new Mr. and Mrs. Eliot were inseparable for the next 8 years. Eliot's health was failing and he succombed to cardio-respiratory problems and stroke.                       
                                                                             -Dorian Borsella  
  Eliot brought the word "Prufrock" into the English language, meaning a sniveling, equivocating sod, underwhelmed by his sense of importance:
 

There will be time,  there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That life and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
….
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
….
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
    So how shall I presume?
….
I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.
And in short, I was afraid.
….
            Do I dare to eat a peach?                     

  (From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

 Preludes conveys a sense of despair and pessimism that is quite appropriate for these pages. It makes your bones feel chilly to imagine  those gusty late Fall early evening London showers pounding on the chimney-pots and blowing leaves about:

 THE WINTER evening settles down
  With smell of steaks in passageways.
      Six o’clock.
   The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
     And now a gusty shower wraps
       The grimy scraps
     Of withered leaves about your feet
       And newspapers from vacant lots;
         The showers beat
           On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
              And at the corner of the street
          A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
          And then the lighting of the lamps.
        The morning comes to consciousness
        Of faint stale smells of beer
       From the sawdust-trampled street
         With all its muddy feet that press
         To early coffee-stands.
        With the other masquerades
               That time resumes,
        One thinks of all the hands
            That are raising dingy shades
               In a thousand furnished rooms.
              You tossed a blanket from the bed,
        You lay upon your back, and waited;
         You dozed, and watched the night revealing
                  The thousand sordid images
               Of which your soul was constituted;
               They flickered against the ceiling.
              And when all the world came back
         And the light crept up between the shutters
          And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
              You had such a vision of the street
               As the street hardly understands;
               Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
             You curled the papers from your hair,
               Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
                 In the palms of both soiled hands.
            His soul stretched tight across the skies
                  That fade behind a city block,
                   Or trampled by insistent feet
               At four and five and six o’clock;
          And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
           And evening newspapers, and eyes
               Assured of certain certainties,
           The conscience of a blackened street
              Impatient to assume the world.
             I am moved by fancies that are curled
               Around these images, and cling:
             The notion of some infinitely gentle
               Infinitely suffering thing.
              Wipe your hand across your mouth,
        And laugh;
          The worlds revolve like ancient women
                 Gathering fuel in vacant lots.