Palmer (afterwards one of his Harvard teachers) to look to ‘speech’ and ‘conversation’ in seeking ‘the development of literary power’. Herrick and Damon argued that ‘good writing does not differ essentially from good talking’ and encouraged a productive relationship with modern spoken idiom. Their suggestion that a fine topic for writers was ‘The Legend of the Holy Grail’ was one Tom would take up later.10

Reading this book on composition, he was pointed towards Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. He recalled in 1934 that a children’s edition of Malory (probably produced by Sidney Lanier, with illustrations of ‘Eliot the Harper’ and the castle of the Holy Grail) had been ‘in my hands when I was a child of eleven or twelve. It was then, and perhaps has always been, my favourite book.’11 Tom’s inclinations were encouraged by his education. Throughout his boyhood Tennyson’s Idylls of the King was still widely admired on both sides of the Atlantic. Edward Austin Abbey had recently painted The Quest and Achievement of the Holy Grail around the walls of Boston Public Library, its narrative written up by Henry James in 1895. Playing his part in such American Arthurianism, Tom was selected to read out his essay, ‘“A Vision of Sir Launfal”, A Christmas Study’, as part of Smith Academy’s Christmas exercises in 1904. Though the essay has not survived, it was based on his reading of Lowell’s Grail quest poem, A Vision of Sir Launfal, a staple of the Smith Academy curriculum and one of Tom’s fifth-year texts that session. The standard school edition presented the poem as ‘fraught with’ a ‘deeply religious element’.12

Lowell’s 1848 Vision links its protagonists to nature and the seasons; it contrasts the ‘leaves’ and ‘sap’ of summer and youth ‘lightsome as a locust-leaf’ with the senescence of ‘An old, bent man, worn out and frail’, imaged as a wintry ‘sapless and old’ tree.13 Beginning in the everyday, Lowell soon plunges into the visionary. Regarded as a classic in Tom’s youth but now criticised for its ‘disregard for form’, Lowell’s poem helped make the Grail legend seem ‘democratic’ to Americans.14 Utterly different, Tom’s poetry too would feature exhausted old men linked to seasonal cycles. Lowell uses the word ‘tent’ of green vegetation; the notes to the school edition call attention to an odd expression, ‘“the river’s shroud”’, perhaps picked up in that unusual phrase in The Waste Land, ‘the river’s tent’.15

Tom’s appropriative poetic ear retained cadences, his imagination was sustained by images and stories. A striking number of the tales he read were about unfortunate love affairs. In German, Theodor Storm’s Immensee, which he studied when he was fifteen, is an old man’s narrative of lost love, memory and desire; Wilhelm Hauff’s Das kalte Herz (The Cold Heart) has a protagonist who kills his wife; Paul Heyse’s ‘L’arrabbiata’ (‘The Fury’) deals with a violent, difficult erotic relationship. In French George Sand’s La petite Fadette features another problematic love affair, though Mademoiselle de la Seiglière by Sand’s lover Jules Sandeau at least ends happily; Pierre Loti’s sensuous novel Ramuntcho, presenting spring as sad for the aged, evokes lost love. Teaching such texts, Tom’s French teacher at Smith Academy, Julia Juvet Kaufmann, born in Geneva to Swiss parents, was sophisticated and cosmopolitan. All his life Tom remembered her as ‘the French Mistress who gave me my first taste for that language’.16 When he was fifteen the local press reported that Mme Kaufmann ‘goes abroad annually and has done so for many seasons’; in a socially conservative milieu this widow in her fifties was the only single woman listed among ‘St. Louis Travelers who have made from Ten to Twenty Transatlantic Trips’.17 For a time she had lived further along Locust Street at number 3200, a not-so-distant neighbour but one very different from Tom’s parents who had never even set eyes on Europe.18

Classroom reading prepared the way for his subsequent work. Extended study of Xenophon’s Anabasis in Greek when he was fourteen and fifteen set him up for his much later translation of St John Perse’s Anabase. Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice yielded phrases used in his mature verse. As early as 1901 four purple stars and a gold star were placed on the board to indicate that he had given seventy ‘excellent recitations in Latin’. Principal Curd as well as Tom’s teacher, Miss Mabel Evans, a dedicated Washington University alumna, signed a 1901 report which told the boy’s parents, ‘We consider his work worthy of the highest praise.’19 Soon he began reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses (cited in The Waste Land’s notes), and Virgil’s Aeneid which became a lifelong talisman.

In Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, a set anthology when Tom was in his penultimate year at Smith Academy, poems LXV and LXVI were short extracts from Renaissance dramas: lyrics of the sort liked by Mr Hatch. The first, Shakespearian song (which Palgrave called ‘A Sea Dirge’) comes from The Tempest. It contains the line ‘Those are pearls that were his eyes’, which would become part of The Waste Land.20 The second lyric, from John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The White Devil, was entitled by Palgrave ‘A Land Dirge’. It concerns ‘The friendless bodies of unburied men’: its last couplet, ‘But keep the wolf far thence, that’s foe to men, / Or with his nails he’ll dig them up again’ would be recast in The Waste Land. A few pages further on in the first book of Palgrave’s anthology is Edmund Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’ whose refrain ‘Sweet Thames! Run softly, till I end my song’ would haunt Tom.21

He was taught that ‘committing a poem to memory … is most desirable’.22 But the verse he memorised did not necessarily come from school. In the Fireside he mentions that ‘There have been many parodys [sic] on “The White Man’s Burden”’, a well-known 1899 poem by Kipling addressed to Americans during a crisis in the Philippines, urging them to ‘Take up the White Man’s burden’ of imperial responsibility over ‘new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half devil and half child’.23 In St Louis ten-year-old Tom, writing that ‘The Philipines [sic] are dangerous’ and that the word from ‘England’ was that ‘The Anglo-Saxon American is marching on’, no doubt came into regular contact with racist rhetoric, but Kipling appealed to him for other reasons.24 When Tom was ten or twelve, he fell in love with the sound of the Anglo-Indian poet’s ballad about the hanging of a soldier, ‘Danny Deever’, and memorised it.25 This ballad of ‘drinkin’ bitter beer’ deploys Cockney speech; like Tom in later life, the Kipling of Barrack Room Ballads is a great poet of English pub-talk: his ‘Tommy’, a poem Tom afterwards picked out, begins, ‘I went into a public-’ouse to get a pint o’ beer’. But the lines of ‘Danny Deever’ that most fascinated the boy were in its last stanza, ‘“What’s that that whimpers over’ead?” said Files-on-Parade. / “It’s Danny’s soul that’s passin’ now,” the Colour-Sergeant said.’ Remembering this poem all his life, Tom realised he loved the imperfect rhyme between ‘Parade’ and ‘said’; ‘the word whimper’ was ‘exactly right’. In adulthood, misquoting from memory, Tom turned Kipling’s dying ‘whimpers’ into ‘whimper’, surely because by then it had been absorbed into his own most quoted line about dying, ‘Not with a bang but a whimper’.26

Like most late-nineteenth-century children, he grew up familiar with death.