Breaking habitual experiences propels creative processes. Countless people have interrupted their daily routines or completely reinvented themselves outside the familiarity of their homelands. Many of America’s most celebrated writers, artists and musicians lived in foreign countries, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Josephine Baker. These famous American expatriates submerged themselves in a strange collection of demographics, economics, political standards, legal procedures, social trends and unfamiliar traditions. Thomas Stearns Eliot, an American-born British poet, is arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century (Collins, 2009). Eliot became a British citizen at 39, while creating some of the best-known poems. When asked whether his works had a connection with his American past, Eliot said:
Yes, but I couldn’t put it any more definitely than that, you see. It wouldn’t be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn’t be so good; putting it as modestly as I can, it wouldn’t be what it is if I’d been born in England, and it wouldn’t be what it is if I’d stayed in America. It’s a combination of things (emphasis added). But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America. (Hall, 1959)
Dustin Senger 