England was the scene of Eliot's encounter as a poet with the particularities of history and place. He went on to develop an idea of England of classical proportions. What follows is an attempt to understand both the encounter and the idea.

Eliot was in Marburg when Germany invaded Belgium on August 3, 1914. The British Government responded to the invasion with an ultimatum. The nation had become impatient for war with its belligerent, industrially confident rival. It was the impatience of an empire that had peaked and needed to reassert itself. German aggression was a challenge, something for an uncertain giant to measure itself against. From the beginning there was a self-conscious pride in the war as being of massive historical moment. Lloyd George described it as the “great conflict,” and saw it as a chance for a nation, long used to empire, to wake up from the sloth of tropical prosperity, and recover its authority and right (Marwick, The Deluge, p. 89).

When war broke out Eliot packed his bags and headed for London. He was twenty-five years old and on study-leave from Harvard. He had already arranged to spend most of the year at Oxford, so the move was not a major inconvenience. It became more inconvenient when he realized how much he disliked Oxford which struck him as a quiet unprepossessing place to live, even before its numbers were depleted by the war.