The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 Read Free Page A

Renaissance; English Composition; Latin Literature – General View of Latin Poetry; Latin Literature – The Roman Novel. 13 NOVEMBER – The Harvard Advocate publishes ‘Before Morning’, 25 NOVEMBER ‘Circe’s Palace’. DECEMBER – In the Advocate Library TSE finds The Symbolist Movement in Literature by Arthur Symons, which he describes in 1920 as ‘an introduction to wholly new feelings, as a revelation’ . Ten years later he continues ‘But for having read his book, I should not, in the year 1908, have heard of Laforgue or Rimbaud; I should probably not have begun to read Verlaine; and but for reading Verlaine, I should not have heard of Corbière.’ It has ‘affected the course of my life’.
    1909 JANUARY – Joins the editorial board of the Harvard Advocate, which publishes 26 JANUARY ‘Song: The moonflower opens to the moth’ and ‘On a Portrait’, 7 MAY a review of The Wine of the Puritans by Van Wyck Brooks, 20 MAY ‘The Point of View’, 25 MAY ‘Gentlemen and Seamen’. 30 JUNE – BA. OCTOBER – starts his senior year and lives at 42 Apley Court. Begins MA course in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences with: Chaucer; the Drama in England from the Miracle Plays to the Closing of the Theatres; Studies in the Poets of the Romantic Period; Literary Criticism in France, with special reference to the Nineteenth Century (with Irving Babbitt); Studies in the History of Allegory; Philosophy of History – Ideals of Society, Religion, Art and Science in their historical development (with George Santayana); and Florentine Painting. A classmate introduces him to Pound’s Exultations and Personae , with the comment ‘this is up your street: you ought to like this’, but TSE ‘didn’t really. It seemed to me rather fancy old-fashioned romantic stuff … I wasn’t very much impressed by it.’ 5 OCTOBER – The Harvard Advocate publishes his review of Egoists by James Huneker, and 12 NOVEMBER ‘Nocturne’.
    1910 12 JANUARY – The Advocate prints ‘Humouresque’ (after J. Laforgue), and 26 JANUARY ‘Spleen’. FEBRUARY – Writes Part II of ‘Portrait of a Lady’. MAY – TSE in Stillman Hospital with scarlet fever. 24 JUNE – Class of 1910 graduates. TSE reads the Class Ode: ‘For the hour that is left us Fair Harvard, with thee’, in Sanders Theater, and it is published in the local newspapers. OCTOBER – TSE goes to Paris to attend the Sorbonne and hear Henri Bergson’s weekly philosophical lectures at the Collège de France. He is tutored by Alain-Fournier, and introduced to his brother-in-law, Jacques Rivière. At his pension , 151 bis rue St Jacques, he meets Jean Verdenal, a medical student, and they become very friendly. NOVEMBER – Writes Part I of ‘Portrait of a Lady’.
    1911 21 FEBRUARY – MA. april – Pays his first visit to London, writes a poem, ‘Interlude in London’. JULY – Leaves for Munich and Northern Italy. Completes the third ‘Prelude’ and the final version of ‘Prufrock’. c . mid- SEPTEMBER – Leaves for America and East Gloucester. OCTOBER – Returns to the Harvard Graduate School to read for a doctorate in Philosophy. Lives at 16 Ash St. Aiken finds him ‘perceptibly Europeanized’. Enrols in Professor Lanman’s Indic Philology course, studies Sanskrit and reads Indian Philosophy with Professor Woods. NOVEMBER – Completes ‘Portrait of a Lady’.
    1912 Appointed Assistant in Philosophy. Meets and falls in love with Emily Hale. The New Realism by E. B. Holt and others is published and ‘made a considerable stir in the philosophical departments of American universities’, TSE wrote in 1935. The Six Realists ‘were animated by a missionary zeal against the Hegelian Idealism which was the orthodox doctrine of the philosophical departments of American universities at the time, and which had begun to turn manifestly mouldy … the Six Realists were un-Teutonised, and on the whole anti-religious, which was refreshing; they were ascetically,