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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

The Young Eliot

The Young Eliot

If these poems had not been written by T.S. Eliot, but by John Smith or Jill Brown, they would not have been published. As it is, the firm of Faber and Faber has decided to honour one of their previous directors, who was also a poet, by offering for a mournful public interest the poems that he wrote in adolescence. And indeed they have their interest; as in this ode on leaving Harvard:

For the hour that is left us, fair Harvard, with thee
Ere weface the importunate years,
In the shadow we wait, while thy presence dispels
Our vain hesitations and fears.
And we turn as thy sons ever turn, in the strength
Of the hopes that thy blessing bestow,
From the hopes and ambitions that sprang at thy feet
To the thoughts of the past as we go . . .

page 417

The problem this kind of poem poses for us is of the following type – ‘How did so ordinary and conventional an adolescent thinker ever become an original modern poet?’ Or else – ‘If Eliot wrote it with his tongue in his cheek, how did he ever get his tongue out of his cheek and back into his mouth again?’ These juvenilia are occasionally warmly imagist – as in the charming poem, ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’, which contains embryonically one of the passages in The Waste Land – but they are never adventurous, never explosive.

The final impression that rises up from these twenty pages of verse and ten pages of notes is that America, the country of violent nonconformism, has its own areas of equally rigid conformity, and that Eliot did not when young question or distinguish himself from a highly conventional social and domestic and academic climate. If he had remained, would his intellect have expired? Fortunately one does not have to answer that question. Eliot moved out of America as if jet-propelled; and something happened to him in Europe which made a psychological retreat impossible. Yet a vestige of the early winter clung to him. At times one can hear it move wearily – the grey mind of an adolescent so trained and conditioned that he does not even know he is suffering – let alone any social reason for it – under the self-debate of Thomas à Becket and the brisk banalities of The Cocktail Party. It accounts for a great deal.

1967 (465)