Macavity: The Mystery Cat has been added to your Basket
- Home
- Non-Fiction
- Essays & Collections
- Letters
- The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 3: 1926-1927
The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 3: 1926-1927
A vivid and personal documentation of T. S. Eliot’s most crucial years, both in his private and public life
Join Faber Members for 10% off your first order.
In the period covered by this richly detailed collection, which brings the poet to the age of forty, T.S. Eliot was to set a new course for his life and work. Forsaking the Unitarianism of his American forebears, he was received into the Church of England and naturalised as a British citizen – a radical and public alteration of the intellectual and spiritual direction of his career.
The demands of Eliot’s professional life as writer and editor became more complex and exacting during these years. The celebrated but financially-pressed periodical he had been editing since 1922 – The Criterion – switched between being a quarterly and a monthly, before being rescued by the fledgling house of Faber & Gwyer. In addition to writing numerous essays and editorials, lectures, reviews, introductions and prefaces, his letters show Eliot involving himself wholeheartedly in the business of his new career as a publisher. His Ariel poems, Journey of the Magi (1927) and A Song for Simeon (1928) established a new manner and vision for the poet of The Waste Land and ‘The Hollow Men’. These are also the years in which Eliot published two sections of an exhilaratingly funny, savage, jazz-influenced play-in-verse – ‘Fragment of a Prologue’ and ‘Fragment of an Agon’ – which were subsequently brought together as Sweeney Agonistes. In addition, he struggled to translate the remarkable work Anabase, by St.-John Perse, which was to be a signal influence upon his own later poetry.
This correspondence with friends and mentors vividly documents all the stages of Eliot’s personal and artistic transformation during these crucial years, the continuing anxieties of his private life, and the forging of his public reputation.
Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet, critic, publisher, was born in St Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He settled in England in 1915, where for a few years he worked in the foreign section of Lloyds Bank. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published in 1917. In 1922, he became editor of the literary journal, The Criterion, publishing The Waste Land in its first…
Read MoreBrowse a selection of books we think you might also like, with genre matches and a few wildcards thrown in.
The four books that illustrate this archival feature are very fine examples of Faber’s literary publishing in the period from …
In the first of our new series of weekly poetry features on the Faber Journal, we welcome the New Year …
Thinking about the recent centenary of the The Waste Land, a provocative question comes to mind: was Faber in the …
We delve into the Faber Archive to collate the many editions of The Waste Land and photograph portraits of T. …
In celebration of the centenary of The Waste Land, author and Faber Poetry Editor Matthew Hollis writes about the enduring …
Watch actor Fiona Shaw reading the opening of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, in an exclusive video from The Waste …
Read an excerpt from the introduction to Mary and Mr Eliot: A Sort of Love Story, which reveals an intimate …
Read and listen to the opening lines of T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land, taken from the Centenary Edition audiobook.
To mark the centenary in 2022, Faber is delighted to announce new publishing and an exciting work of non-fiction by …
The Waste Land, first published in the inaugural issue of The Criterion in October 1922, celebrates its centenary in 2022.
Sullivan is awarded the Prize for her debut collection, Three Poems.