Time, Doubt and Vision: Notes on Emerson and T. S. Eliot

No one reading the poems of T. S. Eliot, particularly the early poems, would deny that they were influenced by the society around Boston and Cambridge. Suffocated by its provincialism, amused by its postures of sophistication, Eliot created a world inspired by the Boston Evening Transcript, peopled it with Cousin Harriet, Aunt Helen and Miss Nancy Ellicott, with the mythical Mrs. Phlaccus and Professor Channing-Cheetah at whose soirees Mr. Apollinax, the visiting professor from Europe, is entertained. This too is the world of J. Alfred Prufrock who sits suffering at his host's table not daring to eat a peach for fear, perhaps, of squirting its juice into someone's lap, but who also impotently yearns to squeeze "the universe into a ball/ To roll it toward some overwhelming question . . ." All this is familiar enough, but one might add that the fact, if somewhat less terrifying, was scarcely less ludicrous than the fiction. The literati of Boston and Cam-