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St. Louis Blues. Thomas Stearns Eliot began his journey through the waste land in the heart of a land of plenty. The youngest, most coddled of seven children, he was born (1888) in St. Louis, a city filled with the disorder of growth and a booming faith in the nation, in business, in machine-driven progress.
The Eliots were New Englanders: they had come to Massachusetts around 1670 from East Coker, Somerset. T. S. Eliot's grandfather moved from Boston to St. Louis, founded the city's first Unitarian Church, as well as Washington University. The Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot could be a stern shepherd; one of his more memorable sermons was entitled: "Suffering Considered as Discipline." But young Tom Eliot's Irish Catholic nurse considered Unitarianism too thin a spiritual cloak against the cold winds of the world; she liked to take him along to her own church, a block away from the Eliots' red brick house on Locust Street.
Tom's father was a wholesale grocer who became president of the St. Louis Hydraulic-Press Brick Co. There was neither smoking nor drinking in the Eliot household. The Eliots were a literary-minded family: evenings, Tom, his brother and his five sisters would cluster around father as he read Dickens to them. Tom's mother wrote a dramatic poem on the life of Savonarola. Tom Eliot was a frail and quiet child. Often, when friends wanted him to come out and play, they found him curled up in a big leather armchair, reading.
He went to Smith Academy in St. Louis, later moved on to Milton Academy near Boston. Wherever he was, he felt out of place. He wrote later: "I had always been a New Englander in the Southwest and a Southwesterner in New England. In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds ... of Missouri; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the hay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts."
At 18 Eliot went on to Harvard.
Babbitt & King Bolo. Professor George Santayana taught him philosophy and Professor Irving Babbitt, the ardent revivalist of the classic past, taught him French literature, got him interested in Sanskrit and Oriental religions (Eliot later devoted two years to their study). Bertrand Russell taught him logic and later introduced him to the London literary world as his "best pupil." Eliot breezed through his course in three years, spent the fourth year working for his M.A. But he was no bookworm. Although he was shy, he made a point of going to dances and parties: Poet Conrad Aiken, a fellow student, recalls seeing tall, dapper Tom Eliot for the first time reeling out of the office of the Harvard Lampoon, where a punch party was in roaring progress.