William Greenleaf Eliot William Greenleaf Eliot William Greenleaf Eliot (August 5, 1811 – January 23, 1887) was an American educator, Unitarian minister, and civic leader in Missouri. He is most notable for founding Washington University in St. Louis, but also contributed to the founding of numerous other civic institutions, such as the Saint Louis Art Museum, public school system, and charitable institutions. The modernist poet T. S. Eliot was his grandson. Eliot was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts. After attending the Friends Academy in New Bedford, Eliot attended Columbian College (now the George Washington University) in Washington, D.C., and graduated in 1831. Eliot
T. S. Eliot has had a blue plaque on it since 1986. For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small number of poems. He was aware of this even early in his career. He wrote to J.H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event." Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals