I’ve
been reading Young Eliot: From St. Louis
to the Waste Land by Robert Crawford, a biography of T.S. Eliot’s life from
1888 to 1922. The period encompasses what are perhaps his greatest and best
known works – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Hollow Men; and The
Waste Land. For major works, only Four
Quartets lies outside this period.
I
knew he was born and raised in St. Louis, where I’ve lived since 1979. But he
is something on a non-entity here, this city that continues to celebrate its
past (it’s almost a legal requirement to know about the 1904 World’s Fair)
while it tries to find new ways to sabotage its future.
Little
physical evidence of Eliot remains in the city. There is the house on
Westminster Place in the Central West End where his family moved when he was
16. He was only there a year before he headed off to school in the Boston area,
first a year at a prep school and then Harvard. And there is a medallion in the
sidewalk in front of the place where the house he was born and raised in once
stood.
To
continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak
Poetry.
Painting: Tom Eliot at 13, oil on canvas
by his sister Charlotte Eliot.
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