Eliot's Juvenilia: An Appraisal

The present study has shown how T.S. Eliot’s poems were not adequately criticised resulting in hasty judgment about the poet. While previous research claimed that Eliot was melancholic in his poems. However, a careful examination of Eliot’s poems written between 1905 and 1910 reveals Eliot being influenced by such poets as Lord Byron, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, even classical poets like Ovid and Homer. Those poems in the early phase of his career as a poet also prove a tendency towards using metrical verses rather than blank verse that dominated his later poems. The present paper suggests that Eliot is a more romantic poet than a classical one. At any rate, these poems are an evidence of a celebrated poet in the early twentieth century.