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T.S. Eliot, 1888-1965, U.S. and England:
conceptual innovator
The year was 1908. Tom Eliot, age 20, was starting his third year at Harvard, studying philosophy and literature. Like any college student, he learned as much from the world around him as he did in the classroom. He went to the theater to see melodramas and to Symphony Hall to hear classical music. He read “Mutt and Jeff” and “Krazy Kat” comic strips. He read the dark poetry of Charles Baudelaire and, with The Flowers of Evil as an inspiration, he explored the gritty night streets of North Cambridge, Roxbury and Dorchester. He wrote poems of his own. In December, he stumbled onto the work of Jules Laforgue, a French poet who had died two decades earlier at age 27. Laforgue’s poetry was mature, poised, satirical and complex. Eliot loved it. Not only was it perceptive about the artificiality of daily life, witty, world-weary, sensitive and self-pitying, it was also was skeptical about romance -- at once entranced by women and patronizing,
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No. 1 poem,
by a 22-year old
These are the concluding stanzas of the Eliot masterpiece, written at age 22, that is tied for No. 1 in the list of the most frequently reprinted poems in anthologies of modern American poetry. It shares that position with “Skunk Hour,” which Robert Lowell wrote at age 41.
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
I grow old...I grow old...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat
a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk
upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Til human voices wake us, and we drown.
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toward them.
Discovering Laforgue was “a personal enlightenment such as I can hardly communicate,” Eliot later recalled. “(W)hen a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person.” Eliot ordered a copy of Laforgue’s complete works and set about transforming his own sophomoric poetry to match or surpass his new ideal. He still wrote much that was unpublishable, but it had scraps of brilliance, inspired by Laforgue, Baudelaire and other late-nineteenth-century French poets.
“Without Baudelaire, Corbiere, Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarme, Rimbaud--I should not have been able to write poetry at all,” he said.
Within two years, he had graduated from Harvard, moved to Paris, and was thinking he might even become a French poet himself. He studied French literature at the Sorbonne, traveled, and wrote poems about Paris scenes and the London winter. On his travels, he took with him a notebook of hand-written poetry – labeled “Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot” – containing only the poems he had composed since discovering Laforgue.
He abandoned the idea of writing poetry in French and decided to return to Harvard to study philosophy. In the August before sailing back across the Atlantic, he visited Munich, where he compiled some old verse fragments and some fresh material into a new poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It echoed of the night streets of Baudelaire filtered through Laforgue’s irony and self-pity – but the poem’s richness of ideas and imagery had moved beyond those sources of inspiration.
Eliot was just short of his twenty-third birthday in that summer of 1911 when he put “Prufrock” in his notebook, then all but forgot it. For three years he was “heartlessly indifferent to its fate,” college friend Conrad Aiken said. Not until the fall of 1914 did Eliot give it a push toward publication. Back in London after three years of further studies at Harvard, he included it in a selection of poems that he showed to American expatriate Ezra Pound, three years his senior and already an established young poet, with five published volumes of poetry under his belt.
Pound embraced it. “This is as good as anything I’ve ever seen,” he said. Pound sent the poem to Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago, urging her to publish it, calling it “the best poem I have yet had or seen from an American.” Still, many of the poem’s early readers didn’t know what to make of it. Pound himself thought it was satire. English poet and poetry editor Harold Munro, who read it at the request of Aiken, called it “absolutely insane.” After some nagging from Pound (“Do get on with that Eliot,” he wrote), Harriet Monroe included it in the June 1915 edition of her magazine.
It became one of most popular American poems of the twentieth century.
How that account fits with the description of Eliot as a conceptual innovator. Plus, how Robert Frost fits the description of an experimental innovator.
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