Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, the seventh and last child of Henry Ware Eliot, a brick manufacturer, and Charlotte (Stearns) Eliot, who was active in social reform and was herself a poet not without talent. Both parents were descended from families that emigrated from England to Massachusetts in the 17th century. William Greenleaf Eliot, the poet's paternal grandfather, had, after graduating from Harvard in the 1830s, moved to St. Louis, where he became a Unitarian minister, but ties to New England were closely maintained - particularly during Eliot's youth, thanks to the family's summer home on the Atlantic coast in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Eliot attended Miss Locke's grade school and Smith Academy in St. Louis. His first poems and prose pieces appeared in the Smith Academy Record in 1905, the year he graduated. He spent the 1905–1906 academic year at Milton Academy, a private preparatory 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 classes with professors such as Paul Elmer More and Irving Babbitt, the latter influencing Eliot with his classicism and emphasis on tradition, and also studied the poetry of Dante, who would prove to be a lifelong source of enthusiasm and inspiration.Eliot received his BA in 1909 and remained at Harvard to earn an MA in English literature, which was conferred the following year. From the fall of 1910, he spent a year in Paris, reading, writing (notably "The Wi...... middle of paper ...... impossible to exaggerate the influence of Eliot or his importance for 20th century poetry". Through his essays and especially through his own poetic practice, he played a major role in establishing the modernist conception of poetry: scholarly, culturally allusive, ironic, impersonal in his case ( but, in his case, full of powerful reserves of private feeling), organized by associative rather than logical connections, and sometimes difficult to the point of being obscure. But, despite the brilliance and penetration of his best essays, Eliot. could not have accomplished such a comprehensive revolution by precept alone through the example of his own superb poetry which he carried to the times, and the poetry will survive intact as his critical influence waxes and wanes and. that the details of his career recede in literary history.