Someone recently commented on an older post of mine about T.S. Eliot that they had found the post while searching for information about Eliot’s relationship to coffee.
I didn’t have a good answer for him.
But when I think of Eliot and coffee, I always drift to Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and the man who measures his life in ‘coffee spoons.’
Prufrock always seems to me to partake very strongly of Eliot’s Anglophilia. He is writing in a style to seems to aim for a certain English-ness in its language. But while the English do drink plenty of coffee, we can agree, surely, that tea is a much English drink.
The coffee spoons with which Prufrock measures his life with are an indication of his mundanity and his measured fears. But tea spoons or something associated with tea (sugar spoons?) would be much appropriate to this English style (not many American poems write about a being embarrassed by a footman holding one’s coat; that particular class consciousness sounds more like something from across the Atlantic to me). In that sense, in an English sense, might not coffee spoons stand out?
Maybe not. I’m just guessing. But I’m guessing that is a certain (essential?) American-ness showing through in Eliot, an American-ness we don’t really see again until Four Quartets.
the coffee philosopher 
This is my favorite poem! It is interesting to think of the coffee spoons as a nationality issue, because I have always interpreted them to be more of a class symbol.
Tea is for everyday and for everyone (anyone from the poor to the rich could drink tea) but coffee was at that time only taken in more sophisticated groups. So, by using coffee spoons he implies that he has frittered his life away in the same kind of uptight, genteel meetings where women might be “talking of Michelangelo.”
Also, I heard someone point out years ago in one my classes that coffee spoons are smaller than teaspoons–for some reason, I’d always envisioned the opposite!–so using coffee spoons in the poem reinforces the smallness / meaninglessness of those conversations.
My impression of “him” (Prufrock) was of someone more bourgeois and less sophisticated – who perhaps tangentially touched more sophisticated company, just as Miss Bates in Jane Austen’s “Emma” is sometimes, by virtues of her former connections, sometimes in the company of her social “betters.”