Humble origins …

… Samizdat Blog: T.S. Eliot Graduates from Aestheticism. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

 I can recall clearly enough the moment when, at the age of fourteen or so, I happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald’s Omar which was lying about, and the almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling which this poem was the occasion of giving me.  It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious, and painful colors.  Thereupon I took the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, Swinburne.