One could stroll to eat with over a thousand fellow students in the great dining hall attached to Sanders Theatre, its roofbeams over sixty feet above diners’ heads, and stare at stained-glass windows depicting Chaucer, Dante and, less predictably perhaps, Sir Philip Sidney; or, as Tom sometimes did, one could scrutinise statuary and paintings in the Fogg Museum, or walk a few hundred yards towards the Weld Boat House if the weather was suitable for rowing. Everywhere, even in the newest buildings, there was a weight of tradition redolent of New England. Completed in the College Yard the year before Tom arrived, Emerson Hall, home to the Philosophy Department, had a large bronze statue of the seated Ralph Waldo Emerson in its concourse, positioned to confront all who entered the building; an inscription over the grandly pillared doorway quoted the biblical book of Psalms, ‘WHAT IS MAN THAT THOU ART MINDFUL OF HIM?’ Tom grew used to such imposing spaces. Later, he would craft a mock-grandeur of his own: ‘The lengthened shadow of a man / Is history, said Emerson’.36

The present-day centrepiece of Harvard Yard, the great Widener Library, had not yet been built. In its place stood the several times extended Gore Hall. Cathedral-like outside and in, this library held about half a million books. Specialities including its Dante collection were not open for undergraduate browsing, but it had a large reading room accessible to all students, even if its librarians seemed stern. A member of the Class of 1907 noted a growing undergraduate wish to seem ‘literary’, a symptom of which was ‘the falling off in attendance at Gore Hall, and the increase at the Union library’.37 As he got used to Harvard, Tom came to prefer student-controlled reading spaces like that of the Harvard Union. Endowed by Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, this extensive club had been built a few years earlier at the corner of Quincy and Harvard Streets, overlooking attractive gardens.

Costing just $10 to join, the Union gave 2,000 student members access to dining rooms, reading rooms and facilities including a billiard room and barber shop. Entering it brought Tom close to the centre of undergraduate literary life. A basement suite of rooms comprised the offices and composing room of the Crimson; the top floor housed the offices of student literary magazines, the Harvard Advocate and Harvard Monthly. Tom sauntered through the entrance hall leading to a hundred-foot-long ‘Living Room’, its oak-panelled walls hung with grand portraits. In winter wood fires blazed in great open hearths at either end while students lounged around, reading (‘Daily papers from the principal cities of the United States are kept on file’), or took coffee and refreshments at small tables. With its game room, writing room and periodical rooms adjoining the main Living Room, the Union was designed for privileged chaps: a separate, less impressive entrance provided access to a ‘ladies’ dining room’.38

Tom liked to wander upstairs to the Union Library, its windows overlooking the lawns, its shelves stocked with over 6,000 books in three connecting rooms. Here students could read unsupervised in ‘agreeable privacy’. For an undergraduate like Tom who enjoyed pursuing his ‘private reading’ at least as much as his coursework, this was a refuge.39 The Union Library was a great place for contemporary literature. New highlights added to its shelves – whether volumes of Shelburne Essays by St Louis-born critic Paul Elmer More or more risqué volumes such as Oscar Wilde’s Salomé – were listed regularly in the Crimson.40 Tom, who started reading Shelburne Essays at Harvard and whose ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ with its image of a ‘head (grown slightly bald) / brought in upon a platter’ would soon parody the Salome narrative, used the Union as an enlivening resource.41

Somewhat sobered after being placed on probation, he chose a more coherent assortment of courses for his second year. Ancient Greek became his centre of gravity and in 1907–8 he signed up for Fine Arts 3 (History of Ancient Art), taught by Classicist and art historian, Assistant Professor George Henry Chase. Chase was cataloguing the classical pottery collection of James Loeb, soon to be presented to Harvard’s Fogg Museum. Chase’s lectures were considered dry, but their subject matter complemented Tom’s study of Greek Prose Composition in the half-course called Greek E, as well as another course he took that session, Greek Literature, where teaching was led by Assistant Professor Charles Pomeroy Parker. An Oxford graduate, Parker had an interest in Greek philosophy, but Greek 2, the literary course that he and Professor Earnest Cary taught, included very different material. The Eliot scholar Grover Smith points out that ‘At Harvard there is a school copy of Aristophanes’ Acharnians in W. W. Merry’s edition, with marginal notes by Eliot.’42 Merry, the Victorian editor, presented Aristophanes as ‘burlesque’.43 Schooled in choral Aristophanic comedies including The Acharnians and The Birds, both of which he read for Greek 2, Tom later fused their structure with modern burlesque in ‘Sweeney Agonistes’. In his late sixties, he would still find the heartily obscene Aristophanes ‘delightful’.44

As well as these Greek courses, in his second year he continued the study of German, an important language for Classical scholarship. He concentrated on grammar and written German, but also read some poetry and prose with a native speaker, the instructor Hermann Julius Weber, and his colleague William Arnold Colwell, whose interest in German literature in eighteenth-century England was a further example of Harvard’s inclination towards comparative literature. Unfortunately Tom’s German was not considered satisfactory. He slipped back into the danger zone with a ‘D’ grade. In French 2a (where his grade was ‘C’) his lead instructor, Assistant Professor Charles Henry Conrad Wright, was working on a compendious History of French Literature.