How pitiful are little folk—
They seem so very small;
They look at stars, and think they are
Denominational.
_T. S. Eliot_
Thomas Stearns Eliot, one of the most brilliant of the young
expatriates, was born at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He received
his A.B. at Harvard in 1909 and his A.M. in 1910. Subsequently, he
studied at the Sorbonne and at Merton College, Oxford, becoming a
teacher and lecturer in London, where he has lived since 1913.
_Prufrock_ appeared in England in 1917. An American edition,
including a number of other verses, was published under the title
_Poems_ in 1920. Eliot’s early work is the more important; it is
curious and sharply original. The exaltation which is the very
breath of poetry is seldom present in Eliot’s later lines. A certain
perverse brilliance takes its place, an unearthly light without
warmth which has the sparkle if not the strength of fire. It
flickers mockingly through most of Eliot’s sardonic pictures and
shines with a bright pallor out of “The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady.” These two long poems are the
book’s main exhibit; they are sensitive and psychologically probing.
Eliot’s ironic rhymed verses, which constitute the bulk of his work,
are in his later style. It is this vein that tempts Eliot most—and
is his own undoing. For irony, no matter how agile and erudite—and
Eliot’s is both—must contain heat if it is to burn. And heat is one
of the few things that cannot be juggled by this acrobatic satirist.
His lines, for the most part, are a species of mordant light verse;
complex and disillusioned _vers de société_.