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· 1 · “Un Présent Parfait” The Year in Review In March 1910, Eliot informed his parents of his desire to spend the following academic year in Paris. In a letter dated April 3, 1910, his mother made clear her disapproval of such a venture and tried to dissuade or at least to discourage him by various tactics: “I have rather hoped you would not specialize later on French literature. I suppose you will know better in June what you want to do next year. . . . I can not bear to think of your being alone in Paris, the very words give me a chill. English speaking countries seem so different from foreign. I do not admire the French nation, and have less confidence in individuals of that race than in English” (Letters 13). Of course, as we know, he went anyway, either in defiance of her objections or with her reluctant acquiescence as a result of delicate negotiations or impassioned pleading. His desire to live in Paris was so strong that he somehow prevailed over this formidable force, who no doubt spoke for his father as well, and even secured their financial backing. Eliot seems to have arrived at such a momentous and daring plan as the result of a convergence of influences in the years 1908–1910. The first, at least chronologically , was his discovery in the small library of the Harvard Union in December 1908 of the recently published second edition of Arthur Symons’s 1899 book The Symbolist Movement in Literature, which introduced him to the French Symbolist poets, the most influential of whom was Laforgue. The book gave him striking insights into new ways of writing poetry and either instigated or fanned the flames of his passion for French poetry.1 As he told Robert Nichols in a letter of August 8, 1917 (Letters 191), he was so impressed by them that he ordered from Paris the two-volume Poètes d’Aujourd’hui [Poets of Today] and subsequently the complete works of Laforgue, revealing later that he believed himself to be the first person in America to own the latter (Greene 20). The “full extent of Eliot’s debt to Laforgue is almost impossible to exaggerate” (46), as Erik Svarny suggests. He discusses some major characteristics that Eliot “Un Présent Parfait”: The Year in Review . 7 admired and emulated: the aim of being “‘original at any cost’” (47); a “plethora of personae” who typically speak in a “cynical laconic tone” (47–8); the theme of the “painful failure of communication with the opposite sex” (48); and the use of vers libre (51). He singles out the dandy persona as being “of incalculable importance to Eliot’s personal and poetic development,” explaining that this male figure (as described in the mid-nineteenth century by Baudelaire) was highly interested in fashion, possessed impeccable taste and elegance, was intellectual, and evinced a detached, ironic impassivity (49–50); traits of Laforgue himself. Indeed, these traits are evident in many of the personae in poems which Eliot wrote “sous le signe de Laforgue” [under the sign or influence of Laforgue] just prior to, during, and immediately after his sojourn in Paris (qtd. in Greene 365; Svarny 47). While Laforgue was the most influential of the Symbolist poets that he discovered through Symons, Eliot often acknowledged how powerfully the group as a whole affected and inspired him. He said, for example, that they evoked in him “wholly new feelings” with the force of “a revelation” (“The Perfect Critic” 5) that influenced the direction of his life: “I myself owe Mr. Symons a great debt: but for having read his book, I should not, in the year 1908, have heard of Laforgue or Rimbaud: I should probably not have begun to read Verlaine; and but for reading Verlaine, I should not have heard of Corbière. So the Symons book is one of those which have affected the course of my life” (rev. of Quennell 357). The most immediate effect was to convince him that he must go to their homeland to seek his own poetic voice. In “What Dante Means to Me,” Eliot states that Laforgue taught him how to develop that voice: “Of Jules Laforgue, for instance, I can say that he was the first to teach me how to speak, to teach me the poetic possibilities of my own idiom of speech.” He goes on to reveal that in both Laforgue and Baudelaire he saw that he could use...

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