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St. Louis cast mysterious spell on poet T.S. Eliot
(by Robert R. Archibald, president of the Missouri History Museum - June 25, 2008)
Thomas Stearns Eliot removed himself from St. Louis in 1905, at the age of 16, and he rarely returned; but he never truly left the city — or rather, the city never left this poet who carried the images of his birthplace through the rest of his life and, subtly, through much of his work.
T. S. Eliot, grandson of the founder of Washington University who also brought Unitarianism to St. Louis, attended Smith Academy, a prep school for his grandfather’s university. But then he went to Harvard, then to Paris, Germany, London. He married an Englishwoman, converted to Anglicanism, lived in England until he died in 1965 and had his ashes buried at St. Michael’s in East Coker. His adopted country remembered him with a memorial stone in the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.
St. Louis has occasionally acknowledged this native son and expatriate who changed the course of 20th century poetry. A marker in the sidewalk in the 2600 block of Locust Street denoted the house where he was born in 1888, but the site is now a parking lot. Another marker is at 4446 Westminster Place, the house where his parents later lived; the street is private and gated. He has a star in Joe Edwards’ Walk of Fame in the Delmar Loop and a plaque at Christ Church Cathedral downtown. If the Prufrock furniture store were still extant, it would probably boast some sort of signage; Eliot may have remembered the store’s advertisement when he was writing “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” his first commercially published poem.
In his poetry Eliot didn’t mention his hometown. Yet what is the river that is “a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,” the river whose “rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom” but the Mississippi?
His basic urban imagery, Eliot once wrote, was that of St. Louis. Most illuminating is a stanza from Four Quartets:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
That is why “history matters.”
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