Eliot was a human being, rather than a remote historic monument.

Setting out Eliot’s formative years in fuller detail than ever before and showing how his life conditioned the writing of his best-known poems, Young Eliot tries to articulate the magnitude of Eliot’s achievement and the very substantial cost involved. In an age when the Eliot Estate is more open to quotation from the full range of Eliot’s writings, the challenge is to select details which will humanise this dauntingly canonical poet for new generations of readers, make clear why his work matters and set out the often painful drama of the life that underpinned The Waste Land. The recently published volumes of Letters and my extensive investigations in Massachusetts, St Louis, New Haven, Cambridge, Oxford, London, Bosham and elsewhere allow me to write a more accurate and intimate account of Eliot’s time in America and in England than has been possible previously. From its title onwards, this book advances a case for Eliot’s early upbringing as fascinating in itself and central to his identity.

Young Eliot presents in detail the poet’s childhood in St Louis – that French-named city of ragtime, racial tensions, ancient civilisations, riverboats and (in Eliot’s words) the real start of ‘the Wild West’.9 Using newly available or previously ignored sources ranging from digitally searchable newspapers to annotated volumes from Eliot’s personal library, and from his later letters to his father’s diary and his mother’s fugitive poetry, Young Eliot portrays an ice-cream loving and mischievous but sometimes rather priggish little boy. St Louis made Eliot. He knew that. ‘For his entire life’ he went on using a black-barrelled fountain pen believed to have been given to him by his mother when he left the American South in 1905; one of its two gold bands was engraved with the initials ‘T.S.E.’10 Indisputably, in the city of his birth he became ‘T. S. Eliot’ of ‘The T. S. Eliot Co., St. Louis’.11 Drawing on the work of local historians and on untapped archival sources, Young Eliot reveals not just Eliot’s early physical environment but also what it meant to his imagination.

With his early teens divided between education in Missouri and summering in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a constant, deepening pleasure for this boy was his love of reading. Images from books, newspapers and shows stayed with him throughout his life, and some of his earliest literary interests – from Cyrano de Bergerac to Edward Lear – subtly conditioned his poetry. Though his schooling was considerably Classical, his teenage tastes in verse reacted against this. They were markedly Romantic, even if his youthful reading was unusually gendered: no Wuthering Heights, no Jane Eyre. His protested Classicism would become a familiar credo, but the young Eliot’s enthusiasm for Romantic poetry was not just something to kick against in later years. Sometimes ironised, it was a lasting presence – from the Byronic epigraph in his first full-length prose book to, several decades later, his following Shelley in recreating Dantescan terza rima in English.

Eliot recalled himself as indecisive. Sometimes he blamed his parents. ‘It is almost impossible for any of our family to make up their minds’, he complained in 1920.12 In his student days, though far from St Louis, he wrote regularly to his mother, continuing to do so for the rest of her life. Even when in 1906 the fledgling poet went to a Harvard ruled over by President Charles William Eliot, he continued within a circle where the influence of his extended family and its code of social service prevailed. Rebelling against this, Eliot conformed to it too. He exhibited a similarly conflicted stance towards the nationality of his birth and towards American literature. Just as the avant-garde French Symbolists, whose poetry fascinated the Harvard student, had learned from the Edgar Allan Poe whose work Eliot had devoured in childhood, so Eliot’s great favourite Jules Laforgue was a French poet particularly influenced by American writing. Arrestingly, Eliot’s student imitation of the Whitman-loving Laforgue was true to the grain of nineteenth-century American poetry, even as it seemed a shocking, Eurocentric departure.

Francophile before he ever set foot in France, young T. S. Eliot might have died in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During the early summer of 1910 he was hospitalised there with a life-threatening infection. Instead, recovered, he proceeded, as planned, to Paris, working hard to reinvent himself. Brilliant, yet still immature, he felt dogged by failure. Eliot’s life was no neat progress towards literary canonisation, towards a form of sainthood or simply towards a Nobel Prize. It was much rawer than that, more jagged, frayed and damaged.