Vijay Seshadri Discusses T. S. Eliot at Literary Hub

Beginning with the 1917 publication of Prufrock and Other Observations, Vijay Seshadri observes the ways that T. S. Eliot has remained prominent in our literary zeitgeist. "In 1917, T.S. Eliot published, in a print run of five hundred that didn’t sell out until five years later, his first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations," Seshadri's essay begins. Picking up from there: 

As with a lot of first books by young poets, the publication of Prufrock had a little of a made-in-the-hood, let’s-put-on-a-show quality to it. The book wasn’t actually a book but a pamphlet, and the publishing house wasn’t actually a publishing house but a London periodical, The Egoist. The Egoist is recognized now as a short-lived and astounding incubator of literary modernism. Then it was one of the tribal organs of a small, youthful or recently youthful, “advanced” coterie of intellectuals and artists who were sure they were doing something new but (except for James Joyce) probably didn’t know exactly what it was they were doing and couldn’t have imagined how significant they would become.

A contributing spirit of the periodical was Eliot’s coconspirator and pal Ezra Pound, in his goofy and benevolent village-explainer period rather than his ugly and malevolent world-explainer period or his shattered and tragic self-explainer one. He prevailed on the magazine to lend its imprint to Prufrock, and, also, subsidized the publication with money he got from his wife. The literature Pound loved he loved so much it might have seemed to him that he was its author. He’d announced, a little mystifyingly, that Eliot had modernized himself on his own (Pound was a big modernizer) and had appointed himself Eliot’s manager. Eliot, with his customary passivity—which was also cagey; Pound nicknamed him Possum—seemed fine with letting Ezra think he was Ezra’s invention.

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