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Late in his life T. S. Eliot, when asked if his poetry belonged in the tradition of American literature, replied: "I'd say that my poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England. That I'm sure of. . . . In its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America." In T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, James Miller offers the first sustained account of Eliot's early years, showing that the emotional springs of his poetry did indeed come from America.

Born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, T. S. Eliot grew up along the Mississippi River, only a few miles down river from Hannibal, the boyhood home of another great American writer, Mark Twain. Miller recounts Eliot's early years in St. Louis schools and follows him in the summers as he vacationed with his family in their Gloucester, Massachusetts, home perched on the Atlantic Ocean's edge. In 1905 at the age of seventeen, Eliot left the Midwest for what would prove to be a lasting separation--attending Milton Academy in Massachusetts for one year and then Harvard for nine years, as an undergraduate and as a graduate student in philosophy. The first time he ventured abroad was 1910, when he spent a crucial year studying in Paris and forming a deep friendship with the Frenchman Jean Verdenal. It was not until 1914, when Eliot was 26 years old, that he left America for England--and found reasons to stay there permanently, becoming a British citizen in 1927.

Miller challenges long-held assumptions about Eliot's poetry and his life. Eliot himself always maintained that his poems were not based on personal experience, and thus should not be read as personal poems. But Miller convincingly combines a reading of the early work--from his earliest poems through 1922, the year The Waste Land was published--with careful analysis of surviving early correspondence, accounts from Eliot's friends and acquaintances, and new scholarship that delves into Eliot's Harvard years. Ultimately, Miller demonstrates that Eliot's poetry is filled with reflections of his personal experiences: his relationships with family, friends, and wives; his sexuality; his intellectual and social development; his influences.

Publication of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet marks a milestone in Eliot scholarship. At last we have a balanced portrait of the poet and the man, one that takes seriously his American roots. In the process, we gain a fuller appreciation for some of the best-loved poetry of the twentieth century. Eliot may have lived most of his life abroad, but he was and continued to be an American poet. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Close-up of an enigmatic young man
This is a fascinating book that throws a flood of light on matters about which one had long been curious. Eliot's youth was intense and privileged, a crisscross of stimuli shaping a great poet, who here more than ever is seen as the product of American soil. There are "paths not taken" and "jolly corners" on every side and one could project from this biography a hundred possible Eliots. That the author of so revolutionary as poem as "Prufrock" (at age 23) should devote years to a thesis on F. H. Bradley is only one of the paradoxes of this career.

The puzzles of Eliot's sexuality are illuminated by the provision of a social context in Bostonian Bohemia (which gave Eliot a rather bad reputation among his Harvard elders). He had trouble loving, let alone falling in love with, women: "I should find it very stimulating to have several women fall in love with me -- several, because that makes the practical side less evident." Pacing city streets at night, he was tormented by restless urges, often perverse and obscene. His scabrous wit was laced with ancestral puritan contempt for sex.

The figure of Jean Verdenal, the most lovable in these pages, looms as being for Eliot what Hallam was for Tennyson, and we also meet a brilliant young Yorkshireman, Karl Henry Culpin. Both died in the Great War in 1917. "The Waste Land" offers itself to be read anew as an "anthem for doomed youth."

Eliot's impulsive, unconsummated and catastrophic marriage was the mutual gravitation of two radically conflicted people who thought they understood one another and could each be the other's salvation -- "the awful daring of a moment's surrender" made possible only by not giving themselves time to think.

Throughout the story one is aware of Eliot's stubborn, quirky intelligence, processing the material of his life with unfailing virtuosity and self-confidence, and able to take deep plunges into many domains of "knowledge and experience" (notably in three years' study of Sanskrit and Eastern religion under Woods, Lanman and Anesaki).

Miller commits some odd solecisms, calling the Pantheon (rue Soufflot) the Parthenon, attributing "pray for us at the hour of our death" to the Lord's Prayer, referring to "Wilde's opera, Salome," but his archeology of the poet's youth deals in a sensitive and scholarly way with its sources, making up for various Aspernian holocausts, and he does not exceed the bounds of sensible speculation in his biographical decipherment of the poems. ... Read more