T.S. Eliot's St. Louis: The City He Spent His Life Running From

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born at two thousand six hundred thirty-five Locust Street in St. Louis on September twenty-sixth, eighteen eighty-eight. He attended Smith Academy here through nineteen oh five, then left for Milton Academy in Massachusetts, then Harvard, then Oxford, then London, where he would become a British citizen and one of the central figures of literary modernism. He received the Order of Merit. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He very rarely mentioned St. Louis.

Washington University in St. Louis holds one of the significant Eliot manuscript collections, and scholars there have spent decades tracing the river in his work. The Mississippi appears in the opening section of The Waste Land as a submerged presence, the dead river, the winter river, the river that carries memory and refuse simultaneously. The fog that settles on The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is the industrial fog of a river city. The class anxieties that run through both poems are the specific anxieties of a family that had come from Puritan New England to a city that was half-southern, half-midwestern, and not entirely comfortable with either identity.

Eliot left when he was seventeen and never came back to stay. He made the city into something permanent by not naming it, by letting it seep into the imagery of poems the whole twentieth century would read. That is one version of leaving a place behind. The other version is that you never quite do.