T. S. Eliot at Harvard University
This paper aims to investigate T. S. Eliot at his alma mater, Harvard University, which he attended for seven years from 1906 to 1910 and from 1911 to 1914. Despite Eliot’s academic records displaying a range of subpar grades during his first and second years at Harvard, he succeeded in obtaining his BA and MA in four years. Simultaneously, Eliot contributed his early 10 Harvard poems including “Song: When we came home across the hill,” “Song: If space and time, as sages say,” “Before Morning,” “Circe’s Palace,” “On a Portrait,” “Nocturne,” “Humouresque,” “Spleen,” and “Ode” to The Harvard Advacate. Along with the French Symbolist poet Jules Laforgue, Irving Babbitt, professor and critic of New Humanism during his master’s course, Josiah Royce, pioneer philosopher at Harvard Department of Philosophy and Psychology, George Santayana, philosopher of pragmatism, Bertrand Russell, visiting professor to Harvard from Cambridge University during his doctoral course, deeply influenced the formation of Eliot’s poetic style and visions of Nobel laureate. A number of Eliot’s invaluable materials including his doctoral dissertation, Experience and the Objects of Knowledge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, are now preserved at Harvard Houghton Library, which may be accessible only with a permission letter from Valerie Eliot.