After Eliot's father altered his will to underscore disappointment in his son's marriage, Ezra Pound influenced Eliot to remain in the British Isles and join the Bloomsbury Circle, a powerful intellectual force in England in the 1920s and 1930s. Following brief teaching stints at High Wycombe and Highgate Junior School, from 1919 to 1922, he worked for Lloyds Bank and began submitting verse of subtle brilliance to magazines. His poems departed from the modish romantics to concentrate on the mystic outlook of the metaphysics and the Christian divines.
Forever done with teaching and money handling, Eliot entered the book world for life as director of publisher Faber & Faber. He distinguished himself with a remarkable first collection, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), followed by Ara vos prec (1920) and The Sacred Wood (1922). Immediately, he began composing two controversial works, The Waste Land (1922), winner of The Dial award, and The Hollow Men (1925), a profound verse of postwar malaise and a prime influence on the "lost generation." Among scholarly successes were Three Critical Essays (1920), Andrew Marvell (1922), and The Criterion, a literary quarterly he published and edited from 1923 to 1939. He received British citizenship in 1927 and sought baptism and confirmation in the Church of England. In 1932, he returned temporarily to the United States as Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton poetry professor and undertook a series of lectures on U.S. campuses.
