T.S. Eliot was a groundbreaking 20th-century poet who is known widely for his work 'The Waste Land.' - T.S. Eliot published his first poetic masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in 1915. - In 1921, he wrote the poem "The Waste Land" while recovering from exhaustion. - The dense, allusion-heavy poem went on to redefine the genre and became one of the most talked about poems in literary history. - For his lifetime of poetic innovation, Eliot won the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Part of the ex-pat community of the 1920s, he spent most of his life in Europe, dying in London, England, in 1965.