Frances Dickey, curator of T. S. Eliot: A Game of Chess, describes the poet’s Saint Louis childhood of the 1890’s, relating the experiences he had in this city with some of his most well-known poems such as “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. Growing up between the Beethoven Conservatory and the Rosebud Bar where Scott Joplin tried out his newest compositions, Eliot absorbed a distinctive combination of German and ragtime musical influences that can be heard throughout his poetic works. Yet the desperate lives of his neighbors in nearby “Death Valley,” along with Saint Louis’s dangerously polluted air and water, created a harsh environment that also left a lasting impression on the young Eliot.
Frances Dickey is a T. S. Eliot scholar and English professor at the University of Missouri. Her books include The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot (Volume 3), the Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts and The Modern Portrait Poem from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Ezra Pound. Dickey served as president of the International T. S. Eliot Society (based in St. Louis) and now edits The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual. She enjoys living in St. Louis with her family and discovering the city’s hidden past.