T. S. Eliot and Jules LaForgue

Abstract

JN December of I908, during T. S. Eliot's junior year at Harvard, he was browsing through library in Harvard Union, building under whose eaves were lodged offices of The Harvard Advocate. The library was similar to those in Houses now. Eliot came across Arthur Symons' The Symbolist Movement in Literature. Symons and his book, first published in I899 and revised in I908, was for Eliot an introduction to wholly new feelings, as a revelation.' In that meeting place for undergraduates who chose to belong to Union, Eliot discovered what he was looking for-and had not yet discovered-in contemporary verse. What he had felt in Donne he would feel in LaForgue and other French poets. The effect of Symons' introduction was immense. First were new poets it exposed to Eliot: I myself owe Mr. Symons a great debt: but for having read his book, should not, in year I908, have heard of LaForgue or Rimbaud; should probably not have begun to read Verlaine; and but for reading Verlaine, should not have heard of Corbiere.2 More particularly, Jules LaForgue became, as Eliot put it, the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech.3 Eliot had heard that conversational quality in John Donne, had sensed it in Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, but it was LaForgue who taught him essence of poetry, how to speak in his own voice. As a result, LaForgue took over Eliot's poetic consciousness. At this period, poem, or poet . . . invades youthful consciousness-Eliot is speaking of effect of