Preludes

In his 1959 essay, “The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet,” Eliot wrote that his urban imagery was in part based on the area in St. Louis, Missouri, where he grew up. He notes that the neighborhood had become “shabby to a degree approaching slumminess,” calling it “seedily, drably urban” (Eliot, T. S. “The Influence of Landscape Upon the Poet.” Daedalus, vol. 89, no. 2, 1960, pp. 419-428. JSTOR). Later, he writes, he “superimposed” additional imagery derived from the time he spent in Paris and London (Eliot 422).

Two other areas that greatly contributed to this urban imagery were Roxbury, a suburb of Boston, and North Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eliot explored these places during the period he was studying at Harvard. Roxbury at the time was an impoverished area, and Eliot believed it was necessary for an artist to explore the sordid or distasteful aspects of life as well as engage in the pursuit of beauty (he added that it was the former that tended to make a deeper impression). Eliot found the slums repulsive but they provided valuable material for his poetry. At the time, he was writing “city” poems in a notebook.