Eliot and I

Gabriel Josipovici

For my fourteenth birthday I was given a copy of the Poems of Shelley in the lovely little World’s Classics edition. This was in Egypt, where I grew up and where the only form of public culture was the Saturday evening open-air film at the Sporting Club, usually a Western or an American musical of the forties. I carried the little book around with me, reading into it at random, and feeling as I did so both exalted and virtuous. This was Poetry, I said to myself, sonorous, beautiful, profound.