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60 free T. S. Eliot trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, took British citizenship at 39, worked in a bank while writing The Waste Land and ended up with a Nobel Prize, the Order of Merit and a stone in Poets' Corner. This quiz covers the life: the Boston Brahmin family, Harvard and the Sorbonne, the meeting with Ezra Pound in 1914, the disastrous first marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, Lloyds Bank, Faber & Faber, the 1927 conversion, the long relationship with Emily Hale and the late happy marriage to his secretary Valerie. It also covers the work: Prufrock and the furniture store that may have named him, The Waste Land's five sections, its Sanskrit ending and Pound's editing, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, the Four Quartets and their four elements, the verse plays from Murder in the Cathedral to the Tony-winning Cocktail Party, and the light verse for his godchildren that Andrew Lloyd Webber turned into Cats. Questions run from easy (which musical came from his cat poems) to expert (which Euripides play lies behind The Cocktail Party). Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Eliot, his poems, plays and the people around him, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our poetry, Ezra Pound and modernist literature quizzes next.
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Q 01T. S. Eliot was born in 1888 in which American city?
St. Louis, Missouri
His grandfather had gone west to found a Unitarian church there; Eliot said Missouri and the Mississippi left a deeper mark on him than anywhere else.
Q 02What do the initials T. S. stand for?
Thomas Stearns
He was named after his maternal grandfather, Thomas Stearns, and known to friends as Tom.
Q 03Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature in which year?
1948
The citation praised his 'outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry'.
Q 04Eliot became a British subject in 1927 at what age?
39
He renounced his American citizenship in the same year he converted to Anglicanism.
Q 05At which university did Eliot take his BA and MA before studying philosophy in Paris?
Harvard
He later went back to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit, and wrote a doctoral thesis on F. H. Bradley that he never returned to defend.
Q 06A 1914 scholarship took Eliot to which Oxford college, which he left after a year?
Merton
So many Americans were there that the junior common room debated a motion abhorring 'the Americanization of Oxford'.
Q 07Which American poet, met in London in 1914, declared Eliot "worth watching" and promoted his early career?
Ezra Pound
Pound got Prufrock into Poetry magazine and later cut The Waste Land down to size.
Q 08Eliot married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in June 1915. What was her job when they met?
Governess
Introduced by Scofield Thayer, they married at Hampstead Register Office less than three months later.
Q 09Which philosopher took an interest in Vivienne while the newlywed Eliots stayed in his flat?
Bertrand Russell
Eliot later wrote that he had persuaded himself he loved Vivienne so as to burn his boats and stay in England.
Q 10What happened to Vivienne in 1938?
Her brother had her committed to a mental hospital
She stayed at Northumberland House until her death in 1947; the Eliots had separated in 1933 but never divorced.
Q 11The 1984 play about the marriage, later a 1994 film, is called what?
Tom & Viv
Willem Dafoe played Eliot and Miranda Richardson played Vivienne in Brian Gilbert's film.
Q 12Which future poet laureate was among Eliot's pupils when he taught French and Latin at Highgate School?
John Betjeman
Eliot also taught at the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe and lectured at evening classes for extra money.
Q 13From 1917 Eliot worked on foreign accounts at which London bank?
Lloyds
He stayed eight years, writing The Waste Land during a period of sick leave from the job.
Q 21Although Prufrock seems middle-aged, how old was Eliot when he wrote most of the poem?
22
Its structure owes much to his reading of Dante, and it alludes to Hamlet and the French Symbolists.
Q 22The name Prufrock may have come from what in Eliot's boyhood St. Louis?
A furniture store
The Prufrock-Litton Company filled a downtown block; Eliot claimed he never recalled where the name came from.
Q 23Eliot's first collection, published in 1917, was called what?
Prufrock and Other Observations
The British and American editions differed by one poem: 'Ode' was swapped for 'Hysteria'.
Q 14In 1925 Eliot left banking to become a director of which publishing firm?
Faber and Gwyer, later Faber & Faber
There he published Auden, Spender and Ted Hughes; his second wife Valerie was his secretary there.
Q 15In 1927 Eliot converted from Unitarianism to what?
Anglicanism
He called himself 'classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion'.
Q 16Eliot's 1,131 letters to Emily Hale were sealed at Princeton until which year, fifty years after both died?
2020
He destroyed her letters to him and lodged his own account of the relationship at Harvard, to be opened at the same time.
Q 17In January 1957 the 68-year-old Eliot married Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. What had she been?
His secretary at Faber & Faber
She had admired him since hearing John Gielgud read Journey of the Magi at 14, and later edited his letters.
Q 18Eliot died in January 1965 in London of what?
Emphysema
He was cremated at Golders Green and his ashes taken to East Coker in Somerset.
Q 19Eliot's ashes rest in the church at East Coker, Somerset. Why that village?
His ancestors emigrated to America from there
A plaque quotes his poem of the same name; a floor stone in Poets' Corner followed in 1967.
Q 20'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' was first published in June 1915 in which magazine?
Poetry
Pound, the magazine's overseas editor, talked founder Harriet Monroe into printing it; critics thought it outlandish.
Q 24How many lines long is The Waste Land?
434
It appeared in October 1922 in Eliot's own magazine The Criterion and in November in The Dial in the US.
Q 25The Waste Land is divided into how many sections?
Five
The first is 'The Burial of the Dead' and the last is 'What the Thunder Said'.
Q 26The Waste Land is dedicated to its editor as il miglior fabbro, meaning what?
The better craftsman
Pound had cut a much longer manuscript down to the published version.
Q 27Eliot completed the first draft of The Waste Land while under a doctor's care in which city?
Lausanne
He had been granted three months' leave from the bank for a nervous disorder and first convalesced at Margate.
Q 28What title did Eliot originally consider for The Waste Land?
He Do the Police in Different Voices
The final title came from Jessie Weston's book on the Grail legend, From Ritual to Romance.
Q 29What does the Sanskrit word repeated three times at the end of The Waste Land mean?
Peace
Eliot's Harvard studies in Sanskrit and Indian philosophy run through his work.
Q 30Why did Eliot add several pages of notes to the first book edition of The Waste Land?
To pad it out and answer the publisher's worry about length
Horace Liveright of Boni & Liveright had bid for the poem at a dinner in Paris with Pound, Eliot and James Joyce.