Lovejoy argued that Emerson’s teachings had ‘done much to counteract “the modern disease of personality”’.54 Tom Eliot would grow up to make fun of Emersonian optimism in his poetry, but he too would present a critique of ‘personality’.

Tom’s minister championed Unitarianism precisely because it was ‘a denomination which publishes no authoritaritative declaration of faith’ yet represented ‘intellectual and spiritual strength’.55 Day believed that ‘human nature improves’. Though Tom would come to react strongly against such Unitarian beliefs, aspects of the faith shaped him. Preaching traditional adherence to the Ten Commandments, Day urged his congregation to ‘Condemn our modern idolatries with the law which condemned ancient idol worship.’ What he advocated was what Tom and his family generally practised: ‘Reverence, sanctity, honor to parents, respect for life, chastity, honesty, truth and unselfishness’.56 This was a lot to live up to, but the Eliots were schooled and churched to live up to it. In Tom’s sixteenth year the Church of the Messiah celebrated Lent with a concert at which ‘Several numbers were heard for the first time in St Louis, one of the most interesting being the Angels’ Chorus from Elgar’s “Dream of Gerontius”’ with its libretto by the famous English Catholic convert Cardinal Newman.57 There had been discussion of Elgar’s oratorio in St Louis beforehand and given that this performance was one of the highlights of his church’s year, Tom was bound to have heard about it. ‘Gerontius’ gave him a name that, like other names garnered from St Louis, lingered in his mind. Retuned, it emerged fifteen years later in that geriatric poem-title, ‘Gerontion’.

His brother Henry was surprised to hear Tom’s later statement that it was reading Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám which had been his crucial early encounter with poetry. Instead, Henry remembered discovering Tom about the age of ten immersed in Milton’s Samson Agonistes. When Henry, then a university student, reported this to the rest of the family, they were astonished.58 Milton was regarded by many Unitarians as sharing their beliefs; he was a great religious poet, though a difficult one. Perhaps Tom was reading what he thought he should be reading; yet his being discovered poring over Samson Agonistes in private suggests that he genuinely wanted to come to terms with it. At the very least it is obvious that, albeit ironically, he did go on to make use of Milton’s title in his own ‘Sweeney Agonistes’.

Henry also recalled his brother reading Browning before he encountered Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát.59 Browning too was a difficult poet. His interest in saints and in religious tensions, whether in ‘St Simeon Stylites’ or ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, was both akin to and sceptically different from Tom’s mother’s pious literary commitment. Browning had perfected the dramatic monologue, the poetic form that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ would build on. At one point in later life, Tom would be dismissive of the Victorian poet in relation to his own work: ‘Browning was more of a hindrance than a help, for he had gone some way, but not far enough, in discovering a contemporary idiom.’60 However, it was precisely Browning’s combination of conversational tone, intellectual rigour, passion and irony that would stand Tom in good stead, and on occasion he came to recognise that Browning among nineteenth-century writers was ‘the only poet’ to devise a way of speech which might be useful for others and that ‘Browning’s lesson’ lay ‘in [the] use of non-poetic material – in reasserting [the] relation of poetry to speech’.61 Henry remained insistent that his brother was wrong about the age when he read certain books, maintaining that Tom read Milton before he devoured Fitzgerald, and that, by the time he was fifteen, Tom, reading voraciously in ways not suggested by his elders, had absorbed a good deal of Browning.62 Tom’s precocity struck some observers. Aged about fourteen and on holiday in Massachusetts, he was introduced to Harvard historian Professor Kuno Franke, a neighbour of his cousin Eleanor in Cambridge. The professor asked Tom with a twinkle if he ‘was a sub-sub-Freshman’.63

Certainly during this formative period Tom encountered Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát, the work which, from at least the 1930s to the 1960s (when Henry was no longer alive to contradict him), he consistently presented as having provided his first profound experience of enjoying poetry. Asked in 1959, ‘Do you remember the circumstances under which you began to write poetry in St. Louis when you were a boy?’ he replied, ‘I began I think about the age of fourteen, under the influence of Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam, to write a number of very gloomy and atheistical and despairing quatrains in the same style, which fortunately I suppressed completely – so completely that they don’t exist. I never showed them to anybody.’64 This poetic start is presented as totally private, and (though Tom does not explicitly say so) in complete opposition to his parents’ values. When he wrote in the 1930s about being excited by poetry as an adolescent, his vocabulary was a sexual one of ‘seduction’ and ‘infatuation’:

Everyone, I believe, who is at all sensible to the seductions of poetry, can remember some moment in youth when he or she was completely carried away by the work of one poet. Very likely he was carried away by several poets, one after the other. The reason for this passing infatuation is not merely that our sensibility to poetry is keener in adolescence than in maturity. What happens is a kind of inundation, of invasion of the undeveloped personality by the stronger personality of the poet.65

This seems to be what happened to Tom when he ‘happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald’s Omar which was lying about’, and found in the poem an ‘almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling’ that was ‘like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious and painful colours’.66 As Henry pointed out to him, there had been a vogue for Fitzgerald’s poem when Tom was about ten or twelve.67 In 1898 the St Louis Musical Club had performed English composer Liza Lehmann’s settings of parts of the Rubáiyát; that same year the Globe-Democrat discussed poet Richard Le Gallienne, agreeing with ‘those who laugh at his impudence in trying to improve upon Fitzgerald’s version of Omar Khayyam’.68

The popularity of the Rubáiyát in America explains why Tom was able to find a copy of Fitzgerald’s translation of the Persian poet ‘lying about’ a few years later. This poem about ‘reviving old Desires’ was unashamedly hedonistic as it invoked ‘the fire of Spring’ in a desert terrain of ‘the Waste’, a milieu of wine, longing, fear of ‘the NOTHING’, and admiration for the fleeting ‘Nightingale that in the branches sang’. Here was a sensuous poetry which asserted heretically, ‘“I Myself am Heav’n and Hell”’, and whose insistent message was carpe diem – something the shy adolescent Tom seemed unable to do at his dancing classes. One of Fitzgerald’s images for desire involves an exhausting search for water in the desert:

Would but the Desert of the Fountain yield

One glimpse – if dimly, yet indeed, reveal’d,

To which the fainting Traveller might spring,

As springs the trampled herbage of the field!69

Though Tom’s quatrains sparked by his absorption in Fitzgerald are lost, it is clear his reading propelled him into an intense engagement with nineteenth-century Romantic poetry. ‘Thereupon I took the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, Swinburne.’70 He was attracted not least to verse that mixed sexual longing with religious sentiment. A poem he mentioned along with Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát as part of the ‘intellectual pubescence’ of ‘a boy of fourteen’ was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’.71 This work was classed among Rossetti’s ‘masterpieces’ in one of Tom’s textbooks, Henry S. Pancoast’s An Introduction to English Literature.72 Even more sensuous than Fitzgerald, Rossetti’s poem portrays a woman longing for her lover as she leans out from ‘the gold bar of Heaven’, wearing ‘Her robe, ungirt from clasp to hem’. Such poetry excited Tom.