Free Creators by Paul M. Johnson Page A

of a kind calculated to reinforce these factors; and, most important, was of a temperament that venerated the riches of the past and regarded their disturbance with abhorrence. His very appearance reflected this orthodox inner man, who declared himself “a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.” Whereas Byron, Keats, and Shelley, all poetical innovators in their day, abhorred starched, buttoned-up collars and favored loose,unrestrictive garments, Eliot was never once (except on holiday) photographed without a tie, wore three-piece suits on all occasions, kept his hair trimmed, and was the last intellectual on either side of the Atlantic to wear spats. Yet there can be absolutely no doubt that he deliberately marshaled his immense creative powers to shatter the existing mold of poetical form and context, and to create a new orthodoxy born of chaos, incoherence, and dissonance.
    There is nothing in Eliot’s background except inhibition, repression of emotions, and strong cultural continuity. He was born in St. Louis, where his father became a successful brick manufacturer, but his family origins were Boston Brahmin. One forebear had been part of the initial Massachusetts settlement of 1620—Puritan, strict, and individualistic. Another had been a Salem witch-hunter. But the family members were not, by the nineteenth century, Calvinists. They were Unitarians, living on that last staging post which links Christianity to outright disbelief in God. They denied the divinity of Jesus but recognized his virtue, seeing him as a superior Emerson. They were extremely careful, in discussing their religious beliefs, to use words meticulously and sparingly, preferring ambiguity to assertion. Later, Eliot himself wrote an ironic poem holding up to ridicule the temperament and habits he inherited from this Unitarian past:
    How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
    With his features of clerical cut,
    And his brow so grim
    And his mouth so prim
    And his conversation, so nicely
    Restricted to What Precisely
    And If and Perhaps and But….
    Eliot was brought up in a family enjoying affluence but without ostentation of any kind, and to privilege mitigated by strong concepts of duty and service, to God, country, community, and culture. His inheritance was virtue, probity, and righteousness. It was softened, however, by circumstance. He was by far the youngest of a large family, the delightful afterthought child of an adoring mother who wrote poetry and cultivated the besttaste; and he was attended by an angelic quartet of sisters, much older than he was, so that in effect he had five careful mothers. They did not spoil but concentrated on him, ensuring that he was taught to be good, conscientious, hardworking, well-mannered, civilized, and pure. Having learned to read early under their careful tuition, he absorbed books voraciously all his life, reading richly and thoughtfully, rereading and analyzing, storing lines and passages of poetry—and prose too—in his heart, so that the habit of quotation and reference became second nature and habitual. 1
    The range of Eliot’s reading was wide from the start, and continued to widen and deepen throughout his childhood and adolescence. If ever there was a creative genius nourished by reading the classics of all nations, it was Eliot. In this respect he was like Milton and Browning, the best-educated—and self-educated—of English poets. At a very early age his mother put before him Macaulay’s History of England , which he read with delight. The family oscillated between St. Louis, on the enormous Mississippi River, and Gloucester, a New England fishing port where they also had a house; and Eliot devoured books on rivers and the sea—and birds. There survives his annotated copy of the Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America , given to him on his fourteenth birthday. He loved studying tiny things in great detail over long hours—a bird’s wing, small