Veering between the comical and the serious, these prose pieces also essay themes that became lifelong preoccupations. The captain, worried about being ‘roasted for the consumption of his hosts’, ends up being made king of an island where, later, colonists convert naked pagan ‘natives’, rendering them disappointingly ‘civilised’.86 All this came from an imagination which would grow fascinated soon by anthropology, by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and would juxtapose the supposedly primitive with the civilised in The Waste Land and ‘Sweeney Agonistes.’

Yet the production which most impressed Tom’s family in 1905 was his lyric imitation of Ben Jonson, written on 24 January as an exercise for Mr Hatch.87 In some ways it was a sensitive pastiche. Tom’s Golden Treasury contained Shakespeare’s ‘Where the bee sups, there sup I’ as well as several Jonson lyrics, including ‘To Celia’ whose stanzaic pattern Tom followed. His poem imitates Renaissance diction, lamenting flowers ‘withered ere the wild bee flew / To suck the eglantine’; it urges lovers to ‘pluck anew’. Tom’s words impressed Mr Hatch. That teacher’s own somewhat less delicate song, ‘Smith Forever’, promising to ‘rear a kingdom wide of schools, / And set Smith on the throne’, appeared in the Smith Academy Record in February along with ‘A Fable for Feasters’, just in time for the school’s ‘sing fest’.88

Reading Tom’s lyric, Mr Hatch was admiring but sceptical; perhaps he knew Tom’s mother wrote verse. Tom recalled that his teacher ‘commended’ the poem ‘warmly’ and ‘conceived great hopes of a literary career for me’, yet also asked ‘suspiciously if I had had any help in writing it’.89 Actually, though Tom remembered his lyric as ‘the first poem he wrote to be shown to other eyes’, it was some time before his family read it. He remembered the precise moment his mother mentioned it to him: ‘she remarked (we were walking along Beaumont St. in St Louis) that she thought it better than anything in verse she had ever written. I knew what her verse meant to her. We did not discuss the matter further.’90

This conversation between mother and son on home ground marked the moment where both seem to have acknowledged that Tom’s gift for poetry was not just something he shared with Mamma but also a talent that set him apart from her. Papa reacted with straightforward pride. Having made or got hold of a typed carbon copy of his son’s lyric, ‘If Time and Space, as sages say’, he posted it to his brother Thomas in Portland, Oregon, scribbling at the top in pencil, ‘Verses by Thomas Stearns Eliot for one of the classes in “Composition”’, adding the comment ‘good for 16 yrs!’91 He was right. The poem builds an argument uniting lyricism and the hint of a philosophical trajectory. John Donne, whose work also does this, was just a name to Tom at this stage – there was one Donne poem in his Golden Treasury, and a passing, slighting mention of him in Pancoast’s Introduction to English Literature.

Now his contributions to the Smith Academy Record regularly appeared in or near pole position in the magazine. He won the respect of his family and Mr Hatch. Chosen to read his poem ‘To the Class of 1905’, he scanned the proud audience at the Smith Academy Fiftieth Annual Graduating Exercises on 13 June that year. His reading was preceded by the Smith Academy Glee Club, who accompanied the class heartily in singing ‘Smith Forever’ and ‘Pull for Good Old Smith’. After Tom read, his classmate Frederick Lake led the Mandolin Club in another school song.92 Tom’s poem, dutifully declaimed from the stage on behalf of his fellow students (‘We go … // We shall return … // We go … // So we are done’), was appropriately stagey. Occasional cadences suggested books he had been reading: ‘“Farewell”, / A word that echoes like a funeral bell’ calls to mind Keats’s ‘Forlorn! The very word is like a bell’ from the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. Ending with a Latinate dramatic flourish, ‘Exeunt omnes, with a last “farewell”’, Tom’s poem marked his ‘first appearance on a public platform before a large audience’. It should have worked. Destructively, however, one of his teachers remarked to him that while his ‘poem itself was excellent, as such poems go’, his ‘delivery’ had been ‘very bad indeed’.93 His classmate Lawrence Post, a more gifted public speaker, orated the ‘Farewell Address’.

After that, Tom was off to Gloucester for the summer, then to the select Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a year’s preparatory work before progressing to Harvard. He had already passed the examinations for Harvard by the spring of 1905. However, he was still just sixteen, and in March his mother was anxious again about his health – ‘he has been growing rapidly, and for the sake of his physical well being we have felt that it might be better for him to wait a year before entering on his college career’.94 Awkwardly, he had not done nearly as well in his last year at Smith Academy. As his mother confessed, ‘My son’s marks were “B” in History, and “C” in everything else except Physics, in which he was conditioned, receiving an “E”.’95 Taking all this into account, she looked at the course catalogue for Milton Academy with Tom in early April.

Housed in handsome buildings on a grassy campus, Milton, just eight miles outside Boston, was an established institution (founded in 1798) with a reputation as a gateway to Harvard. Tom’s brother was already a Harvard student, and the family knew Harvard’s procedures. Tom had been informed that he had done well in French and English when he sat the Harvard prelims; he was wondering if at Milton he might study some more science (his weakest area) and maybe some English and American history. He was rather uncertain, but, recognising he had been a ‘faithful student’ at Smith Academy, his parents were ‘willing to have him wander a little from beaten paths this year and take a somewhat miscellaneous course’, if that was what he wanted.96

Writing to Richard Cobb, the recently appointed headmaster at Milton, Lottie Eliot was, as so often, anxious about her younger son. She worried he might be ‘lonely’.