The Letters of T. S. Eliot

July 23, 2012
Spanning only two years, this volume of Eliot’s correspondence is prodigious in all things, not least intellect, beauty, personality, and size. Only four years after the publication of The Wasteland, the increasingly more famous Eliot is pulled in several directions by his poetry, the articles and reviews with which he made a living, and time-consuming editorial duties for the journal The Criterion. This was an emotionally intense time, as Eliot became a British citizen and converted to Anglicanism, a decision whose theological basis he explores in his letters. Complicating matters further was Eliot’s marital life, as his wife Vivien’s psychological instability required frequent hospitalization and treatment. But Eliot found some solace in writing to his brother, Henry, as well as to his mother, to whom he sent all of his work before publication and with whom he felt freer to discuss his emotional state. The biggest draw, of course, is the poet’s extensive correspondence with intellectuals of the time, including Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, Marianne Moore, Virginia Woolf, Robert Graves, Bertrand Russell, and Jean Cocteau. Helpfully, the editors have done a fine job in providing extensive footnotes that elucidate each letter with vital background information and context. However, the nonspecialist may want to wait for the abridged version.

November 15, 2012
Most of these business letters deal with Eliot's excellent editing of the Criterion as he encourages, solicits, delays, apologizes, and tactfully rejects. Working under tremendous pressure, he is always patient, helpful, and generous. The letters reveal the strategies of book reviewing and, surprisingly, how few of the books noticed in the Criterion, which changed from quarterly to monthly, have survived. Yet Eliot rejected Auden's poems and was himself rejected for an All Souls fellowship at Oxford because his poetry was considered obscene & blasphemous! The more personal letters from his first wife, Vivien, show thatlike Scott Fitzgerald's wife and James Joyce's daughtershe really was deranged. Eliot, who played martyr to her vampire, did not confine her for selfish reasons. She wrote John Middleton Murry, You are in some sort of purgatory, I am perhaps thoroughly damned, and sounds just like her counterpart in The Waste Land: What shall I do now? . . . What shall I ever do? The superb annotations are sometimes longer and more interesting than the letters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)