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Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 8
The eighth volume in the acclaimed series of selected letters from T. S. Eliot.
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Eliot is called upon to become the completely public man. He gives talks, lectures, readings and broadcasts, and even school prize-day addresses. As editor and publisher, his work is unrelenting, commissioning works ranging from Michael Roberts’s The Modern Mind to Elizabeth Bowen’s anthology The Faber Book of Modern Stories. Other letters reveal Eliot’s delight in close friends such as John Hayward, Virginia Woolf and Polly Tandy, and his colleagues Geoffrey Faber and Frank Morley, as well as his growing troupe of godchildren – to whom he despatches many of the verses that will ultimately be gathered up in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939).
The volume covers his separation from first wife Vivien, and tells the full story of the decision taken by her brother, following the best available medical advice, to commit her to an asylum – after she had been found wandering in the streets of London. All the while these numerous strands of correspondence are being played out, Eliot struggles to find the time to compose his second play, The Family Reunion (1939), which is finally completed in 1938.
‘The publication of the correspondence of TS Eliot is one of the more formidable literary undertakings of our time … The task of editing and glossing and footnoting has been (since the death of Eliot’s widow, Valerie, in 2012) the indefatigable work of John Haffenden. His pace of production, 7,600 pages in 10 years, is impressive.’
‘Taken together these letters are little less than a lesson in conduct, a kind of tireless poise, a demonstration of grace under pressure. They are invariably, as [John] Haffenden notes in his preface, “humane and engaging, constructive and inventive, and frequently jokey” — and sometimes they are more than that: revealing, touching and wise. They are also, like all good letters, wonderfully different in tone when writing to different friends and acquaintances.’
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…
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