“A perfect present”: A Review of T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year

While knowledge about much of T.S. Eliot’s life and early work has become available in recent years, a major gap has been the profound impact of his 1910–1911 year in Paris. By focusing on both Paris itself and the cultural milieu Eliot found there, Nancy Duvall Hargrove’s book, T.S. Eliot’s Parisian Year provides important insights into what Eliot called “un présent parfait.” In an original and distinctive style, she suggests the complexities of that pre-War Parisian scene and its influence on Eliot’s thinking and poetry. Hargrove’s study creates a wide-ranging analysis of the arts, politics, and technological changes of the period, and examines Eliot’s personal relationships. Her book incorporates previous disparate suggestions and possibilities into a new, coherent whole that illuminates Eliot’s pre-war experience of Parisian culture and its centrality to the development of his modernism.