The lifting of restrictions on these several genres now provides scholarly access to Eliot's lifetime engagement with the arts in both popular and high culture, showing him to be far removed from tired allegations of cultural elitism, continuously educating himself not only in literary but in visual and performance traditions, seeking friendships in artistic circles, and vigorously defending the arts from censorship as critic and editor. The authors of these new studies in the several arts have

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... begun to mine the wealth of previously uncollected and unpublished archives, building upon David Chinitz's T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003) and expanding the range and depth of the Asian, Renaissance, Victorian, and modern art forms with which Eliot enriches the cultural texture of his oeuvre. As a Harvard student, Eliot educated himself in the arts both informally as a voracious reader and concertgoer, and formally in the classroom, including Fine Arts 20b: Italian Renaissance Artists, which he took during the 1909-10 academic year. In this course, taught by Edward Forbes, Director of Harvard's Fogg Museum, Eliot took copious notes on the paintings, frescoes, and altarpieces of Uccello, Castagno, Veneziano, Fra Filippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Donatello, and Michelangelo, among others, with frequent visits to the Fogg. He continued his exploration of the arts and architecture during the 1910-11 academic year at the Sorbonne in Paris, which included a journey to Italy for visits to museums and cathedrals, as chronicled by Nancy D. Hargrove in Eliot's Parisian Year (2009), in her separate study of Eliot's Italian notebook, 1 and here in her delineation of Eliot's encounters with Asian and African art in Paris and London. Frances Dickey's fi rst essay in this volume shows the importance to Eliot and his early poem "Mandarins" of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1909, a time when the enterprising student was beginning to seek the friendship of leaders and patrons in the arts, including Mrs. Isabella Stewart Gardner, a supporter of the Museum of Fine Arts and the builder of her own magnifi cent collection under the guidance of Bernard Berenson, a connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art. Fenway Court, as she called her museum when it opened in 1903, contained 2,500 paintings and more than 3,000 books on art, architecture, and music; in the Music Room she hosted concerts and recitals by prominent musicians. Though Eliot's signature does