Chasing Spirits in the 'Waste Land'

Reflecting on the Harvard of T.S. Eliot

Lately, I’ve found myself disillusioned with Harvard, the enchantment of its novelty worn away by semesters of unhelpful faculty, fickle university presidents, and course syllabi littered with contemporary personal narratives. Although I wasn’t sure if I would remain a humanities concentrator after a few years here, what keeps me returning to courses in the Barker Center is not Harvard’s renown but rather the unwavering brilliance of the literary canon.

One of my favorite poets, T.S. Eliot ‘09, shared some of my sentiments after becoming disenchanted by what Harvard had to offer him. Thomas Stearns Eliot arrived as a Harvard undergraduate in the fall of 1906, bright-eyed and with little to show for himself—his academic standing at Milton Academy was subpar, and the early verses he penned in his teenage years were uninventive. Yet it was not the strength of well-known institutions that cultivated Eliot’s genius, but rather his humble response to literary traditions and the canon that would structure his best-known works, such as “The Waste Land” and the Four Quartets.

Although he earned a poor report card, the young Eliot benefited from prominent family connections that anchored his surname in the wealthier parts of New England. A distant relative, Charles William Eliot, for whom the future Eliot House would be named, was the president of Harvard when Thomas Stearns arrived as a freshman. Despite being born in the Midwest, he had moved to Massachusetts to attend Milton, so the area was familiar to him. The young Eliot was assigned housing in a spacious Apley Court suite among other descendants of East Coast elites. He would spend the greater half of the next decade in and out of Harvard’s campus, immersing himself in its various academic departments, social clubs, and the literary magazine, the Advocate.

In 1914, however, Eliot abruptly severed ties with Harvard. He was at Oxford when the outbreak of World War One disrupted transatlantic travel. But the war was perhaps only an excuse; despite finishing his dissertation in Philosophy, Eliot refused to return to Harvard and defend it. Instead, he joined London’s literary circles and married an Englishwoman. He quickly became disillusioned with Oxford as well, writing in a letter from a Merton College common room: “I have the feeling that I am not quite alive– that my body is walking about with a bit of my brain inside it, and nothing else. As you know, I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books, and hideous pictures on the walls.”¹

University life was stifling and claustrophobic for Eliot. Although the climate and cuisine of Oxford wearied him, he wrote in a 1915 letter, “I dread returning to Cambridge [Massachusetts]... the college bell, the people in Cambridge whom one fights against” are “all the same. The great need is to know one’s own mind.”² Later that year, he published “Prufrock,” and his work would soon come to be lauded by academia; yet, Eliot would remain an intellectual divorced from education, never settling comfortably into the academy. From his struggling grades at Milton to being placed on academic probation at Harvard, Eliot’s genius could not be tamed by the traditional structures of learning.

But Eliot’s departure from academic conformity in the form of institutions and from poetic structure in the form of governed meter and verse does not mean he disregarded tradition. On the contrary, Eliot had a filial gaze towards tradition that as quite apt for the modern man; in an essay on poetic theory, he faults contemporary readers for requiring novelty in verse when in fact they “shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts. . . may be those in which the dead poets, [the writer’s] ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”³ Eliot steeped his writing in a careful study of those artistic ancestors. He did not waste time worshiping institutions; rather, he lingered at the feet of scholarship, curiously widening his personal education to expand his writing’s vision.

Eliot’s 1922 “The Waste Land” is littered with allusions to mythical kings and heroes. Amidst the chaos of a shelled-out London and war-torn society, Eliot leaned backward in time to search for spiritual direction and restoration. He writes through the mind of the Greek mythological seer Tiresias and quotes Psalm 137 in Section III: “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept.”⁴ The ache Eliot felt amidst the tribulations of the 20th century was healed by the empathy of the Greco-Roman tradition, the Bible, and Eastern spirituality. We too must turn our gaze backwards while enduring hardship, recognizing that the people who lived before us endured similar trials. Literary tradition can be to us a mother in the modern age.

Eliot’s time at Harvard, Oxford, and other institutions of higher education reveals the absurdity of “university people” and their litany of superstitions. Eliot was a nonconformist who flouted the rules that tried to bind his writing, and his personal learning exceeded grades, degrees, and dissertations. The modern intellectual should readily do away with the “wasteland” of clueless administration and the stifling strictures of university life. He cannot, however, throw out alongside them the hard-won and oft-forgotten lessons of visionaries past. It is not the presidents nor professors that enliven a university, but rather the immense breadth of intellectual history still available to those who seek it.

JANE AUSTEN

A version of this article originally appeared in Harvard Eternal, the September 2024 print issue of the Salient.

1. Eliot, T. S., Eliot, Valerie, Eliot, Vivienne, and Berg Collection. The Letters of T.S. Eliot (1st ed.). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988.

2. Ibid.

3. T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent by T. S. Eliot, Poetry Foundation, 2009.

4. T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” 1922.