ABSTRACT
T. S. Eliot’s early poetry has tenaciously been interpreted in metaphysical and erotic ways, with an awareness of its indeterminacy and irony. This chapter claims that Eliot’s juvenilia strengthen a notion that Lyndall Gordon and other biographers have touched on but not developed when interpreting his works: the motif of juxtaposed urban materialities. One of the young poet’s favourite pastimes was slumming, especially in St. Louis, Cambridge (MA), Paris, and London. In ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and other early poems, Eliot often depicts the street and its nightly denizens, who obliquely are pitted against the ladies of the drawing room. His detailed observations of upper-class life must thus be set against his equally searching scrutiny of urban prostitution, squalor, and decay. Pettersson shows that nightly strolls and related reading, not only of French symbolism but also of Victorian poetry and literary naturalism, helped to open the young Eliot’s eyes to another side of urban life. This re-reading of the early Eliot considerably changes the view of him as an effete young poet and displays the backdrop of The Waste Land.
