Eliot' s interested in poetry in about 1902 with the discovery of Romantic. He had recalled how he was initiated into poetry by Edward Fitzgerald' s Omar Khayyam at the age of fourteen. 'It was like a sudden conversion', he said, an 'overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling.' From then on, till about his twentieth year of age (1908), he took intensive courses in Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Rossetti and Swinburne. It is, no doubt, a period of keen enjoyment...At this period, the poem, or the poetry of a single poet, invades the youthful consciousness and assume complete possession for a time...The frequent result is an outburst of scribbling which we may call imitation...It is not deliberate choice of a poet to mimic, but writing under a kind of daemonic possession by one poet. Thus, the young Eliot started his career with a mind preoccupied by certain Romantic poets. His imitative scribbling survives in the Harvard Eliot Collection, a part of which is published as Poems Written in Early Youth. 'A Lyric' (1905), written at Smith Academy and Eliot' s first poem ever shown to anther' s eye, is a straightforward and spontaneous overflow of a simple feeling. Modeled on Ben Johnson, the poem expresses a conventional theme, and can be summarized in a single sentence: since time and space are limited, let us love while we can. The hero is totally self-confident, with no Prufrockian self-consciousness. He never thinks of retreat, never recognizes his own limitations, and never experiences the kind of inner struggle, which will so blight the mind of Prufrock. 'Song: When we came home across the hill' (1907), written after Eliot entered Harvard College, achieved about the same degree of success. The poem is a lover' s mourning of the loss of love, the passing of passion, and this is done through a simple contrast. The flowers in the field are blooming and flourishing, but those in his lover' s wreath are fading and withering. The point is that, as flowers become waste then they have been plucked, so love passes when it has been consummated. The poem achieves an effect similar to that of Shelley' s 'when the lamp is shattered'. The form, the dictation and the images are all borrowed. So is the carpe diem theme. In 'Song: The Moonflower Opens' (1909), Eliot makes the flower--love comparison once more and complains that his love is too cold-hearted and does not have 'tropical flowers/With scarlet life for me'. In these poem, Eliot is not writing in his own right, but the poets who possessed him are writing through him. He is imitating in the usual sense of the word, having not yet developed his critical sense. It should not be strange to find him at this stage so interested in flowers: the flowers in the wreath, this morning' s flowers, flowers of yesterday, the moonflower which opens to the moth w not interested in them as symbols, but interested in them as beautiful objects. In these poems, the Romantics did not just work on his imagination they compelled his imagination to work their way. Though merely fin-de-siecle routines, some of these early poems already embodied Eliot' s mature thinking, and forecasted his later development. 'Before Morning' (1908) shows his awareness of the co-habitation of beauty and decay under the same sun and the same sky. 'Circle' s Palace' (1909) shows that he already entertained the view of women as emasculating their male victims or sapping their strength. 'On a Portrait' (1909) describes women as mysterious and evanescent, existing 'beyond the circle of our thought'. Despite all these hints of later development, these poems do not represent the Eliot we know. Their voice is the voice of tradition and their style. is that of the Romantic period. It seems to me that the early Eliot' s connection with Tennyson is especially interesting, in that Tennyson seems to have foreshadowed Eliot' s own development. Eliot was wrap