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COMMENT
687

Mr Eliot's command of publicity is not exceptional, and we feel it necessary to put down, for those who care for information, these hardily gleaned facts of his biography. In 1888 he was born in St. Louis; in 1gog and 1910 he received, respectively, the degrees of Bachelor and of Master of Arts at Harvard; subsequently he studied at the Sorbonne, the Harvard Graduate School, and Merton College, Oxford. He has been a lecturer under both the Oxford and the London University Extension Systems, and from 1917 to 1919 he was assistant editor of The Egoist. We have heard it rumoured that he is still "A Londres, un peu banquier"; those who can persuade themselves that facts are facts will find much more of importance in the Mélange Adultère de Tout, from which the quotation comes; as that poem was written several years ago it omits the names of Mr Eliot's books: The Sacred Wood, Poems, and The Waste Land (not to speak of the several volumes later incorporated in Poems) and omits also the fact that Mr Eliot is now editor of The Criterion, a quarterly which we (as it were en passant) hereby make welcome. The most active and, we are told, the most influential editor-critic in London found nothing to say of one of the contributions to the first number except that it was "an obscure, but amusing poem" by the editor. We should hate to feel that our readers can judge of the state of criticism in England by turning to the first page of our November issue and reading the same poem there.