The discussion of Eliot’s cultural lineage has frequently assumed a simple opposition between the rival claims of English domicile and New England descent. Eliot’s writings have themselves encouraged this tendency. Overtly, they require us to observe the landscapes of London and rural England, or the family snapshots of haut-bourgeois Boston. The St Louis of Eliot’s childhood, which furnished the name of his memorable persona (Prufrock-Littau, Hugh Kenner informs us, was the name of a local furniture store), and the image of the river as ‘a strong brown god’ which opens Dry Salvages, rarely occurs as the scenario of the poems. Indeed, the stage-direction prefixed to this poem demonstrates Eliot’s usual attitude towards his mid-western patrimony, distracting our attention from the unsavoury effects of the Missouri mise-en-scene (‘the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops’) to the properties of a more condign birthright.

Yet Eliot’s mid-western origins are not merely a matter of ‘background’; they are a central part of the meaning of his poetry. The complexity of his personality has its sources and resources in the complex negotiation of a complex and contradictory inheritance. But the personal equilibrium salvaged from this inheritance—the spiritual cement for this ‘familiar compound ghost’—owes much to that temporary settlement effected by Eliot’s family in the boom conditions of nineteenth-century St Louis. If the Mid-West is absent as the overt content of Eliot’s poetry, it presides throughout as a determining context of experience, embodied in the very forms of that experience, in the stances and attitudes assumed by the poet.