  Throughout his life, Santayana’s literary achievements are evident. As an eight-year-old Spaniard, he wrote Un matrimonio (A Married Couple), describing the trip of a newly married couple that meets the Queen of Spain. Later in Boston, he wrote a poetic parody of The Aeneid; “A Short History of the Class of ‘82”; and “Lines on Leaving the Bedford St. Schoolhouse.” His first book, Sonnets and Other Verses (1894), is a book of poems, not philosophy. And, until the turn of the century, much of his intellectual life was directed to the writing of verse and drama. He was a principal figure in making modernism possible but was not a modernist in poetry or literature. His naturalism and emphasis on constructive imagination influenced both T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative” is drawn from Santayana, and Stevens follows Santayana in his refined naturalism by incorporating both Platonism and Christianity without any nostalgia for God or dogma.