T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of St. Sebastian" long has frustrated scholarly attempts to situate it within the arc of the writer's poetic career. Eliot had enclosed a draft of "The Love Song of St. Sebastian" with a letter from Marburg, Germany to his Harvard friend Conrad Aiken, stating that he was sending the poem as well as several others because "I am disappointed in them, and wonder whether I better knock it off for a while--you will tell me what you think." 1 Probably composed shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Eliot's dramatic monologue in the voice of the martyr Sebastian, who narrates a fantasy of his self-flagellation in the presence of his lover before strangling her, constitutes one of the more violent works of Eliot's fifty-year career. Claustrophobic, morbid, and obsessive, it may well stand as the most savage depiction of disturbed eroticism to appear in a work by a major twentieth-century poet. Although its appearance in Christopher Ricks's recent edition of Eliot's early verse, Inventions of the March Hare, has lent renewed interest to "The Love Song of St. Sebastian," the work continues to elude understanding since critics tend to skirt interpretation as they register their distaste for Eliot's choice of subject matter. A review of Inventions of the March Hare quotes several lines from "The Love Song of St. Sebastian" and observes that they "suggest, if not calculated sadism, a certain tinge of the bathhouse" and speculates that perhaps "Eliot held back from publishing houses some of these verses for fear they would turn weak stomachs...." When the poem was first published in Valerie Eliot's 1988 edition of her husband's early letters, the critic Alan Jenkins characterized it as a "weird sado-masochistic affair of self-flagellation and murder... an indiscretion if ever there was one."
