Stranger Shores: Literary Essays

The feeling of being out of date, of having been born into too late an epoch, or of surviving unnaturally beyond one's term, is all over Eliot's early poetry, from 'Prufrock' to 'Gerontion'. The attempt to understand this feeling or this fate, and indeed to give it meaning, is part of the enterprise of his poetry and criticism.

For poet who had such success, in his heyday, in importing the yardstick of impersonality into criticism, Eliot's poetry is astonishingly personal, not to say autobiographical.