When T. S. Eliot sailed to Europe in July 1914, he was resuming a journey he had begun in November 1910 – on several levels. As a student, he had spent that earlier academic year in Paris, where he attended lectures at the Sorbonne and officially, if somewhat diffidently, furthered his work toward a doctorate in philosophy at Harvard. As a poet, however, he drew deeply from the Parisian scene. One of the primary sites in the poetics of urban modernity, the city offered him the spirits of Baudelaire and Laforgue and the legacy of a heady French décadence. The atmosphere went straight to his head as the muse of youth and crested into a period of poetic productivity as intense in its energy as it was promising in quality. Now, in 1914, the doctoral student was using a fellowship to bring his dissertation to completion, beginning with summer study at the University of Marburg in Germany and continuing at Merton College, Oxford. The mood was professional, dutiful, resigned. And the maturing poet … well, this poet was, in his own view, not maturing at all: the correspondence from that summer shows him already thinking of himself, in the conceit of a witticism for another stalled career, as a young poet “with a great future behind him.”