T. S. Eliot, Born to Write – Astrology Musings

I was astonished when I first saw T. S. Eliot’s birth chart, one of the leading modernist poets of the 20th century.

When he was born, the Sun, Mercury and Venus were all in his Libra first house along with Uranus. In fact, the Mercury Venus conjunction closely straddles the ascending degree.

A Lover of words

With all this activity in air, here is a natural thinker, communicator, writer, a lover of the beauty of language and literature, words in all their forms. Here too is natural charm and easy, and probably quite lengthy, conversation.

His Libran Sun forms easy trines to both Neptune and Pluto in Gemini in house 9 of the higher mind and a nice sextile to Jupiter in house 3. He clearly was a very deep thinker with an expansive mind, a lover of spiritual, hidden matters, of foreign culture and philosophy; he did go to great lengths to learn Sanskrit as an aid to his development as a poet and writer, always encouraged by his mentor, Ezra Pound.

Outside of the box

The Gemini Moon in house 9 is trine his first house Uranus. He is quick witted too, with an unusual manner and ability to think outside the box, a prerequisite for a modernist writer.

If we look to his third and ninth houses, indicators of his mental functions more fully, we see that Jupiter not only rules house 3 but is present in it along with Mars. He has a naturally open, well developed and forceful everyday mentality.

However, I also notice that Jupiter forms a close opposition to Neptune in house 9. This difficult aspect, though bringing a certain confusion, possibly between the everyday functioning as a writer and his passion for expansive thinking, was probably actually a spur to greater achievement in the end, being a source of imagination and inspiration, especially as it is part of the configuration with the Sun mentioned above.

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