Becoming T. S. Eliot

- Blurb -

How did an ordinary, if intelligent, boy who wrote unremarkable poems become-with no help, and in record time-the author of one of the most significant and beloved poems of the twentieth century? T. S. Eliot' s juvenilia show little inclination to question the social, cultural, religious, or domestic values he had inherited. How did a young man who wrote uninspired doggerel about wilting flowers transform himself-in a mere twenty months-into the author of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"? In Becoming T. S. Eliot, Jayme Stayer-praised by Christopher Ricks as a scholar who is "scrupulous in acknowledging the contingencies that will always preclude perfection"-explains this staggering accomplishment by tracing Eliot' s artistic and intellectual development. Relying on archival research and original analysis, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Inventions of the March Hare, Eliot' s youthful notebook, which was once thought lost but was rediscovered after Eliot' s death. Stayer places Eliot' s verses in the chronological order of their composition, teasing out the narratives of their making. Focusing on the period from 1909 to 1915, this incisive portrait of Eliot as a budding writer is as much a study of Eliot himself as it is a study of how a writer hones his voice.