A writer's art, T. S. Eliot proposed, depends ‘on the accumulated sensations of the first twenty-one years’ of his life. Born in St Louis on 26 September 1888, Eliot spent more than sixteen of his first twenty-one years there. Reminiscing about his early life on a visit to his birthplace in 1953, the poet said: ‘I am very well satisfied with having been born in St Louis: in fact I think I was fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London’ (TCC, 45). Eliot had been invited to St Louis to address an audience gathered to celebrate the centenary of Washington University. The university had been co-founded by (and initially named after) his celebrated grandfather the Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot. Acknowledging the profound and continuing influence of what he called his grandfather's ‘law of Public Service’, Eliot observed that ‘it is no doubt owing to the impress of this law upon my infant mind that, like other members of my family, I have felt, ever since I passed beyond my early irresponsible years, an uncomfortable and very inconvenient obligation to serve upon committees’. Although his grandfather died a year before he was born, Eliot noted that ‘as a child I thought of him as still the head of the family’ (TCC, 44).

William Greenleaf Eliot came to St Louis in 1834 at the age of 23, shortly after graduating from Harvard Divinity School.