sixteen, Eliot was sent to Massachusetts and attended Milton Academy preparatory school. Milton was a highly regarded Unitarian school for the privileged. There Thomas concentrated his studies on physics, Latin, and history. During his years at Milton, Eliot began to cultivate an interest in sailing. His father had purchased a house in Glouceter, on the coast of Massachusetts. It was here where he and his brother, Henry Ware Eliot Jr., learnt to sail. Eliot's hernia prevented him from participating in many sporting activities thus sailing became a keen interest of his which he pursued until his years at collage (Sencourt 10-14).
In 1906, after spending two years at Milton, Eliot was accepted into Harvard University. At Harvard, he majored in philosophy and studied under such famous professors as William James, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience and leader of the pragmatic movement, and Charles Eliot Norton, who translated the works of Dante. Eliot partook in several extracurricular activities as well. For several years he served as editor of the Harvard Advocate, who he occasionally wrote poems for. Even here at Harvard, Eliot felt the strong influence of Unitarianism due mostly to Harvard's pious president, Charles William Eliot, a distant relative of Thomas. It was at this time when Thomas began to reject both the teachings of the Unitarian church and the American literature of the early nineteen-hundreds. Instead Eliot turned to European literature for a source of inspiration (Sencourt 17-21). His discovery of the symbolist literary movement influenced Eliot greatly. The French poet, J!
ules Laforgue, was the most influential of these symbolist writers. Eliot once said, "The form in which I began to write, in 1908 or 1909, was directly drawn from the study of Laforgue" (Unger 569).
During Eliot's years at Harvard, he decided to study abroad in France at the Sorbonne for a year. Here Thomas was
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