It was the question of accent that took up most of the conversation at my first meeting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the editor of the Harvard Review, Christina Thompson—also a former editor of Meanjin.

Did the St Louis–born Eliot come to Harvard in 1908 with a Missouri accent and did he leave it here or lose it here, by accident or design? It was a question that I also put to the poetry curator of the Lamont Library. And the consensus was that nobody really knows and nobody ever will, since, among other things, there are no recordings of Eliot in his youth. It was generally agreed that the Missouri accent is pretty neutral anyway and it wouldn’t be all that difficult to lose. All we can say with any certainty is that, at some point, Eliot acquired that voice, the voice that became synonymous with T.S. Eliot. And he never lost it.