Meet T S Eliot

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4738/t-s-eliot-the-art-of-poetry-no-1-t-s-eliot

“You began to write poetry in St. Louis when you were a boy?

T.S. ELIOT

I began I think about the age of fourteen, under the inspiration of Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam, to write a number of very gloomy and atheistical and despairing quatrains in the same style, which fortunately I suppressed completely—so completely that they don’t exist. I never showed them to anybody. The first poem that shows is one which appeared first in the Smith Academy Record, and later in The Harvard Advocate, which was written as an exercise for my English teacher and was an imitation of Ben Jonson. He thought it very good for a boy of fifteen or sixteen. Then I wrote a few at Harvard, just enough to qualify for election to an editorship on The Harvard Advocate, which I enjoyed. Then I had an outburst during my junior and senior years. I became much more prolific, under the influence first of Baudelaire and then of Jules Laforgue, whom I discovered I think in my junior year at Harvard.

INTERVIEWER

Did anyone in particular introduce you to the French poets? Not Irving Babbitt, I suppose.

ELIOT

No, Babbitt would be the last person! The one poem that Babbitt always held up for admiration was Gray’s Elegy. And that’s a fine poem but I think this shows certain limitations on Babbitt’s part, God bless him. I have advertised my source, I think; it’s Arthur Symons’s book on French poetry*, which I came across in the Harvard Union. In those days the Harvard Union was a meeting place for any undergraduate who chose to belong to it. They had a very nice little library, like the libraries in many Harvard houses now. I liked his quotations and I went to a foreign bookshop somewhere in Boston (I’ve forgotten the name and I don’t know whether it still exists) which specialized in French and German and other foreign books and found Laforgue, and other poets. I can’t imagine why that bookshop should have had a few poets like Laforgue in stock. Goodness knows how long they’d had them or whether there were any other demands for them.”