Thomas Stearns Eliot was born September 26, 1888, in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot, a brickmaker, and Charlotte (Stearns) Eliot, who was active in social reform and was herself a not untalented poet. Both parents were descended from families who emigrated from England to Massachusetts in the 17th century. William Greenleaf Eliot, the poet's paternal grandfather, after graduating from Harvard in 1830, had moved to St. Louis, where he became a Unitarian minister, but ties with New England were closely maintained, especially during Eliot's youth, through the family's summer home on the Atlantic coast in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Eliot attended Miss Locke's Elementary School and Smith Academy in St. Louis. His first poems and prose appeared in the Smith Academy Record in 1905, the year of his graduation. He spent the 1905–1906 academic year at Milton Academy, a private school in Massachusetts, and then entered Harvard University, beginning his studies on September 26, 1906, his eighteenth birthday. There he published frequently in the Harvard Advocate, took courses with professors such as Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, the latter of whom influenced Eliot through his classicism and emphasis on tradition, and also studied the poetry of Dante, who would prove be a permanent source of enthusiasm and inspiration. Eliot received his bachelor's degree in 1909 and remained at Harvard to earn a master's degree in English literature, which he was awarded the following year. Beginning in the fall of 1910, he spent a year in Paris, reading, writing (including "The Wi...... middle of paper... impossible to overestimate Eliot's influence or his importance to twentieth-century poetry century") Through his essays and above all through his poetic practice, he played an important role in establishing the modernist conception of poetry: cultured, culturally allusive, ironic, impersonal in manner (but, in his case, rich in powerful reserves of private feeling). , organized by associative rather than logical connections, and sometimes difficult to the point of obscurity. But, despite the brilliance and insight of his best essays, Eliot could not have brought about such a total revolution merely by precept through the example of his superbly successful poetry, and the poetry will survive unchanged as his influence criticism waxes and wanes, and as the details of his career fade into literary history.