"And so you are going abroad..." T.S. Eliot in 1910

1910 was the year that T.S. Eliot graduated from his first degree at Harvard; it was the year he published his first poem ('Humoresque: After Jules Laforgue'); and it was the year he travelled to Paris to hear Henri Bergson lecture.
According to some, Eliot's sojourn in Paris was life-changing. Lodging at 151 bis rue St Jacques, Eliot took French lessons from Alain Fournier (author of Le Grand Mealnes) and befriended a fellow-lodger, Jean Verdenal. In The Making of an American Poet, James E. Miller speculates that this friendship with Verdenal constitutes the first great gay love of Eliot's life - and his first great loss: Eliot marked Verdenal's death in World War I by dedicating Prufrock and Other Observations to his memory.

Charles-Louis Philippe

Miller suggests that Verdenal is a strong presence in The Waste Land too, one that lies behind the figure of Phlebas the Phoenician. A memory of Verdenal informs the vision of the lilac girl in 'The Burial of the Dead', he argues; and, more tenuously, he suggests that a boat trip to St Cloud with Verdenal lies behind the 'Damyata' section of the 'What the thunder said'.
There are more convincing, material influences upon Eliot to be traced from this period too. It seems that Verdenal introduced him to l'Action Français - Charles Maurras' right-wing movement, an influence upon Eliot in the 1930s; and Fournier introduced to Jacques Rivière, secretary to La Nouvelle Revue Française (established in 1909) and an associated group of writers, including André Gide. In turn, it is likely that Gide's tribute to Charles-Louis Philippe in November 1910 helped to introduce Eliot to Philippe's work, particularly Bubu de Montparnasse, which strongly influenced the urban landscapes of Eliot's early published poetry.

(c) Houghton Library

It's striking that Eliot should turn to another written source to make sense of Paris. Biographical speculations aside, it's certain that this period saw significant developments in his poetry. According to Christopher Ricks' edition of his poetic notebooks (Inventions of the March Hare), it was during Eliot's stay in Paris that fragmentary scraps of verse began to cohere into 'The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock' (a discarded passage, 'Prufrock's Pervigilium' shows the heavy influence of Philippe) and in November 1910, Eliot composed the first section of 'Portrait of a Lady' (a poem that closes with the narrator's departure for Europe). In other words, this is the period in which Eliot starts to shrug off his reliance upon Laforgue and write his earliest and most striking mature verse.