T. S. Eliot’s Urban Temperament and his Early Verses

Thomas Stearns Eliot born in 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, is an urban poet. He studies and presents urban life and its landscape in his poems. He uses urban themes and images in his poems to reflect the malaise of modern civilization. The presence of such urban elements in his works lies in his urban temperament. The growth and development of his urban temperament and how it gets manifested in his poems will be analysed in the paper. Two of his early poems, Preludes and Rhapsody on a Windy Night, both published in 1917, have been analysed in detail pointing out the urban elements present in them. The presence of such urban elements in his works therefore asserts Eliot as an urban poet.