The 20th Century needed a poet (at least) to explain it to itself, and a good place for a 20th Century poet to be born was St. Louis, Mo. Early, Thomas Stearns Eliot left this American heartland to strengthen at Harvard his ancestral New England roots. His output there was conventional verse, but his intake was metaphysics, logic, science and heavy drafts of European and Oriental culture.
His main effort was to be the construction of a bridge of insight between his time and traditional Western culture. He spanned a small part of that gap when he went to live in London,...
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