There once was a young poet called Tom who wrote bawdy verse with aplomb … – the bawdy verse, limericks and erotic poems of T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot is perhaps the most important poet of the twentieth century with a reputation for erudite, allusive and challenging poetry. In his personal life he was puritanical, stiff, ultra-conservative, religious, ill-at-ease with women and celibate from his late thirties. Yet, despite this, in his student years he wrote the so-called Columbo and (King) Bolo verses of astonishing lewdness for a small coterie of male friends, and to which he referred back virtually throughout his life as a running private joke. He jumped on the craze of writing limericks, often bawdy; and in the twilight years of his life, he wrote erotic poetry in praise of his beloved second wife, Valerie, with whom he found happiness and sexual fulfilment. All of these verses are ‘out of character’ for the man known to the public, and an astonishing counterpoint to the seriousness of his main works.