Having written keeping certain assumptions in mind, I should like to acknowledge them before proceeding. Though discussing Eliot's poetry published after 1927 only briefly, and mentioning his plays hardly at all, I have drawn from Eliot's critical writing throughout his career. I have supposed that as is often true of modern poets (Pound, Williams, and Stevens come to mind), Eliot's critical prose offers the best avenue into his poetry. And I have assumed that Eliot's deep American past, extending far back in time before his birth, influenced his interests, his problems, and his poetry. I affirm these conclusions even though some of Eliot's formulations, notably his statements about the poet's impersonality, have tended to mislead readers and critics, at least as that theory has been commonly applied. Fortunately, ever since Randall Jarrell's famous apostrophe on this topic in “Fifty Years of American Poetry,” Eliot's audience has been less reluctant to bring the poet and his poems into more accurate relation, a relation Eliot's own subsequent comments authorized in any event.

To few poets have biographical considerations, especially in the senses in which I have applied them, been so relevant yet so curiously ignored. Every sort of writing Eliot did has a root in his personal past, especially insofar as it involves the historical past. Examining Eliot's life pattern, St. Louis to Boston to Europe to England, we trace everywhere his tense, complicated relation to New England, to his extraordinary family, to their religion, and to his native land.