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.composed in October 1910; (MorgendämmerungBeacon Street, the area s main thoroughfare, is [German for morning twilight ]): Prelude in Rox-home to the Boston Athenæum, an independent bury, composed in July 1911; and Abenddäm-library and museum founded in 1807 on the model merung [ evening twilight ], which was composedof similar private galleries in England.A few doors after Eliot had returned to the United States, indown is the headquarters of the Unitarian Univer- Cambridge, Massachusetts, in November 1911.salist Association, the modern organization repre- The prominence of Dorchester and Roxbury assenting the religious denomination that dominated locales is easily explained: They are to this daythe spiritual life of southern New England for most other working-class towns located near Cambridge,of the colonial period and to which the Eliot family the sort of places a young man of means mightbelonged.The hill s narrow, gaslit streets, with their haunt when he was out for a night on the town. sidewalks and row after row of Federal-style houses, Such locales find their way into the opening ofshould come to mind as one reads The Love Song Prufrock as well, with its images of sawdust res-of J.Alfred Prufrock or Portrait of a Lady, from taurants with oyster shells and men in shirtsleeves1911, and this exclusive area for proper Bostonians leaning out of windows.no doubt figures as well in such later Eliot poems Eliot s most significant use of Boston and its envi-as The Boston Evening Transcript, Aunt Helen, rons, however, comes in He Do the Police in Different Cousin Nancy, and Morning at the Window, Voices, the original version of The Waste Land.all composed in about 1915.As an undergraduate, Eliot was not above slum- Bradley, F[rancis] H[erbert] (1846 1927) Influ-ming it either, so Boston s working-class locales ences are all too often chicken-and-egg proposi-were sources of inspiration for his early poems as tions.How can it be determined to any degree ofwell.Inspired by JULES LAFORGUE and, very likely, satisfaction whether a writer s way of thinking isCHARLES BAUDELAIRE, the two French symbolist influenced by another or that writer merely findspoets who most influenced his early urban and that other writer s or thinker s ideas and beliefssocial poetry, Eliot experimented with poems congenial to ideas and beliefs that he already holds?whose interests and topicality were involved with Sometimes, too, a person may give expression tothe seamier side of life in a vast metropolis such someone else s way of thinking that, until then, hadas Boston.This early experimentation would lead not been articulated in any systematic or clear wayeventually to the Preludes. Eliot was penning by that person.The point is that when the connec-poems with titles such as First Caprice in North tion is made, there is no way of determining whatCambridge and Second Caprice in North Cam- wiring there was in place already that made thebridge as early November 1909.Their subjects connection possible.It is this very indeterminatewere cityscapes that focused, in a handful of spare nature of the relationship between an event and alines confined largely to description, on the under- person s knowledge of the event that is at the heart 508 Bradley, F[rancis] H[erbert]of the philosophy of the English idealist philoso- ist HENRI BERGSON, whose philosophical premisespher F.H.Bradley.resembled Bradley s, inasmuch as Bergson, too,Along with the 19th-century French symbolist stressed the essential and yet unknowable stabil-poet JULES LAFORGUE and DANTE ALIGHIERI, it is ity of objective reality, which could be knowndoubtful that anyone exerted as much influence on only by degrees of perceptual coloration.It wasEliot s thought and writing as Bradley did, yet the not until June 1913, meanwhile, that Eliot s inter-extent and exact nature of that influence, like any est in Bradley can be documented.Still, he wasother, is purely speculative
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