An often gruelling existence nourished his poetic vitality. Some of his life’s most important experiences, the ones that changed its course, were accidental. Those accidents could be disastrous.

He wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, his greatest early poem of anxious masculinity, in 1910–11. Differing in length, its opening lines are conversationally over-familiar yet also weirdly estranging in imagery. The young Eliot who went to Paris has mastered Laforgue’s idiom, and then convincingly surpassed it:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table …13

Even the tiniest verbal gestures here – not ‘an operating table’, or even ‘the table’, but the more mundanely domestic ‘a table’ – are unsettling. Yet if ‘Prufrock’ sounds out unmistakably the new note of modern poetry, then this poem was written alongside other, wilder, less polished works including ‘The Triumph of Bullshit’. Young Eliot (who introduced the word ‘bullshit’ into literature) tries hard to sound shockingly knowing. Fuelled by prejudice and laddishness, his scurrilous and obscene poems too are part of his development: student attempts at writing which struggle to cover with a fabricated voice of experience the poet’s own sexual shyness, cerebral sophistication and troubled sense of lack. Triumphantly, in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ he manages to create a male voice which is vulnerable and sexually floundering at the same time as intellectually alert. In so doing he moves beyond effortful posturing to produce a poetic masterpiece that nonetheless draws on aspects of his own psyche.

Too much writing on Eliot over the last two decades has treated him as a thinker more than a poet. True, one of the most ‘heavily annotated’ books in his personal library was his copy of the philosopher F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality; yet among his lifelong ‘most precious’ volumes were editions of Virgil and Dante – poets who, like Eliot, were nourished by philosophical thought.14 My narrative attends to Eliot’s graduate student interests in philosophy. It salutes his intellectual brilliance, detailing his work with Masaharu Anesaki on Japanese Buddhism and with Charles Lanman on Sanskrit. Yet these intellectual adventures were neither more nor less important to his creative imagination than were his death-defying youthful navigation of Mount Desert Rock and his explorations of the coast in a sailboat – dramatic and entertaining events that undergird later poems, including The Waste Land.

Though he seems to have had crushes on girls in childhood, the young Eliot who customarily wore a truss was sexually gauche. His first serious falling in love was with Emily Hale, a Bostonian Unitarian preacher’s daughter with a mentally ill mother. Later, his disastrous marriage to the young ‘pretty vivacious’ Englishwoman Vivien Haigh-Wood helped hurt him into further poetry, especially that of The Waste Land.15 Vivien’s and his own apparently unending ill-health put them in a state of frequent personal crisis. ‘Why does Tom love me?’ Vivien wondered a few years after The Waste Land appeared. ‘I love Tom in a way that destroys us both.’16

Young Eliot strives to strike the right balance between the outward form of living which mattered to this bankerly poet and other, sometimes wounded kinds of inner life to which readers have limited access, yet which were vital to his intimate existence and to his writing. The verse is nowhere here treated merely as a crossword puzzle or source-hunter’s labyrinth. Consciously crafted artistic work, it nonetheless transmutes personal agonies, treasured images and insights. While some of it can bristle with learning, it can also scald. However much he might have resisted the idea, knowledge of his life heightens a sense of Eliot’s finest work as fusing finessed artifice with unmistakable cri de cœur.

I cannot claim to be in sympathy with all of Eliot’s ideas, and I do not attempt to disguise anti-Semitic moments in his work, or other elements of racism and sexism deeply ingrained in his society and never fully outgrown. This poet was the grandson of a preacher whom Ralph Waldo Emerson considered to be a true ‘Saint’.17 Yet, though preoccupied with sainthood and tainted mortification from at least such early poems as ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’, Eliot was no saint and should not be presented as such. From boyhood onwards he had a fascination with asceticism and religious experience which became increasingly important. Still, for all he read about such experiences, he refused to fake them in himself. The young Eliot’s philosophical training led to an intense scepticism and relativism; in poems, including ‘The Hippopotamus’, he could attack Christianity with blasphemous vigour and guile. These facets of his sometimes conflicted personality make him all the more beguilingly complex.