Early Verse

Abstract

For better or worse ultimately, T. S. Eliot in his boyhood and adolescence did not enjoy such powers of expression as those which enabled Tennyson to write abundantly with unusual euphony in his early years. Nothing suggests that he lisped in numbers, or that he ever wrote freely except in abnormal circumstances. But for a small number of poems, most of which were preserved in academic journals, there appears to be no direct evidence of his poetical proclivities before he reached the age of twenty-one. In his introduction to Eliot’s Poems Written in Early Youth, John Hayward refers to a few jeux d’esprit which did not survive in any recorded form.