Eliot’s youthful poems display negative characteristics of old age which persist and are subsequently deployed throughout his oeuvre. There is a consistent portrayal of old men as deteriorating, both physically and mentally; and after his initial graduation poems, there is an eschewal of the common notions that status and wisdom accrue with age. His early writings display evidence of the influences of his grandfather, Reverend William Greenleaf Eliot, who established his family’s values of lifelong service, but also of carpe diem philosophies reflected in his readings of Omar Khayyám and Robert Louis Stevenson. Poetic devices to which Eliot will repeatedly return, such as projection into the perspectives and reminiscences of old men, and a tension between youth and age, are established, as are characteristics of senescence which will recur throughout his later work.