In September of 1914, shortly after Eliot's arrival in England from Germany, where he had been studying until the outbreak of what would become the Great War, and in a letter that includes a sodomitical stanza that he (perhaps jokingly) claims he submitted for a hundred-dollar prize, Eliot writes to Conrad Aiken praising the kindness of Ezra Pound, his new friend, and noting Pound's support of Eliot's poetic endeavors. In the same letter Eliot expresses a deep anxiety about his poetic career and his level of productivity:

Eliot's self-critical judgment about the quality of his work is allied with a discomfort which he describes in terms remarkably akin to the corporeal frustrations of sexual “impotence” – explicitly associating poetic productivity with a more youthful blithe spirit and virility.