Murder in the Cathedral Lesson Plan

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888 to a family with prominent New England heritage. Eliot largely abandoned his midwestern roots and chose to ally himself with both New and Old England throughout his life. He attended Harvard as an undergraduate in 1906, where he was accepted into its literary circles, and had a predilection for 16th- and 17th-century poetry, the Italian Renaissance (particularly Dante), Eastern religion, and philosophy. Perhaps the greatest influences on him, however, were 19th-century French Symbolists such as Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and especially Jules Laforgue. Eliot took from them a sensual yet precise...