Before leaving for France in 1910, Eliot had begun a number of poems, including "Preludes", "Portrait of a Lady", and possibly The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". As an earnest of his intentions he bought a notebook at Gloucester, entitling it, retrospectively rather than anticipatively, "Inventions of the March Hare". (Appropriate as this description may seem to such poems as "Nocturne" and "Conversation Galante", it applies also to poems of self-torment such as "The First Debate between Body and Soul".) After entering his unpublished verses from November 1909 onwards, he added to it at various times, notably in Paris and at Harvard, until he reached London in 1914. Among the most interesting entries are confessional poems, some of them remarkable for phantasmagoric and sustained images of martyrdom, heightened visions of an abnormally excited, sometimes fevered, imagination, expressive of the spiritual agony which for many years was never to be long quiescent, which was to give Eliot kinship with Baudelaire, and prove to be the mainspring of his best poetry.