Preludes

In his 1959 essay, “The Influence of Landscape upon the Poet,” Eliot wrote that his urban imagery was in part based on the area in St. Louis, Missouri, where he grew up. He notes that the neighborhood had become “shabby to a degree approaching slumminess,” calling it “seedily, drably urban” (Eliot, T. S. “The Influence of Landscape Upon the Poet.” Daedalus, vol. 89, no. 2, 1960, pp. 419-428. JSTOR). Later, he writes, he “superimposed” additional imagery derived from the time he spent in Paris and London (Eliot 422).

Two other areas that greatly contributed to this urban imagery were Roxbury, a suburb of Boston, and North Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eliot explored these places during the period he was studying at Harvard. Roxbury at the time was an impoverished area, and Eliot believed it was necessary for an artist to explore the sordid or distasteful aspects of life as well as engage in the pursuit of beauty (he added that it was the former that tended to make a deeper impression). Eliot found the slums repulsive but they provided valuable material for his poetry. At the time, he was writing “city” poems in a notebook. There were 14 of these poems, with titles like “Caprices in North Cambridge” and “Preludes in Roxbury.” The latter formed the basis of the first three parts of “Preludes.” Eliot also employed literary sources for his presentations of urban life, including the works of French novelist Charles-Louis Philippe (1874-1909), who wrote about the urban poor, and the poetry of the French symbolist Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).

The view of the city depicted in “Preludes” can also be found in Eliot’s most renowned poem from his early work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” published in 1915, the same year as “Preludes.” Like the shorter poem, “Prufrock” personifies some of the natural elements of the night as they act on a city street:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys (Eliot, T. S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Poetry Foundation. 1963).

Interestingly, “Prufrock” contains one image that suggests crucifixion, when the character Prufrock refers to himself as “pinned and wriggling on the wall” (he is referring metaphorically to how he is judged by others on social occasions) (“Prufrock”). Eliot appears to have been fascinated by crucifixion imagery at this stage of his work. His biographer Peter Ackroyd notes that Eliot hung a reproduction of Paul Gauguin’s 1889 painting “The Yellow Christ” on his wall when he returned from Paris in 1911 and enrolled again at Harvard (Ackroyd, Peter. T. S. Eliot: A Life. Simon and Schuster, 1984, p. 46). Also, one of Eliot’s notebook poems from this period is titled “The Little Passion.” In it, the speaker wanders city streets at night, knowing he is on the way “To some inevitable cross / Whereon our souls are spread, and bleed” (Eliot, T. S. “The Little Passion.” Poetry Nook. Lines 15-16). All this lends context to the image in “Preludes” of the “soul stretched tight across the skies” (Line 39) and also of the “infinitely suffering thing” (Line 51). Eliot likely did not have in mind any Christian doctrine of salvation through Christ’s death on the cross; instead, he uses the image to show the immense suffering that human life involves.