Like all the rest of us, T. S. Eliot was born in blood, sweat, and tears; unlike most of us, he was born in St. Louis. This is the first open secret about him, the first well-known but almost forgotten fact of his life: that he was born and brought up (but in a special way, peculiar to his family traditions) a Midwestern American. The year 1905 marked the end of his life in St. Louis. In June he finished his schooling at Smith Academy in fairly high style: he won the Latin prize and as Class Poet wrote and recited a lengthy ode of fourteen stanzas, unexceptionably "poetic," stuffed with the wide-eyed clichés of adolescence, sentimental, echolaliac. His mother was proud of him: this was just the kind of poetry she herself tried to write. Young Tom was being sent East to school for good and sufficient worldly reasons. At the age of not quite seventeen (his birthday did not come till September) he was considered too young for Harvard; and it would have been a handicap for him to enter the freshman class direct from a St. Louis day school, whereas the stamp of Milton Academy, traditionally a… Read full this story
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En Route to "The Waste Land": The Early Years of T. S. Eliot have 297 words, post on www.theatlantic.com at January 1, 1974. This is cached page on CuBird. If you want remove this page, please contact us.