The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 5: 1930-1931 by John Haffenden

The Letters of T.S. Eliot #5

by T.S. Eliot

This fifth volume of the collected letters of Nobel Prize–winning poet, playwright, essayist, and literary critic T. S. Eliot offers readers a fascinating, full-bodied view of the artist at a personal, professional, and spiritual crossroads. These correspondences, written during a period of great literary activity for The Waste Land author and soon after he dedicated himself in earnest to the Anglo-Catholic faith, reflect Eliot’s newfound devotion to the Anglican Church, the continuing deterioration of his marriage to his wife Vivien, and his professional and personal dealings with James Joyce, George Orwell, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and others.

Genres: Biography

Hardcover

First published November 18, 2014

About the author

Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot

Reviews

[Nick Spencer · Rating 5 out of 5]

As enjoyable as previous volumes; more so even, as the list of interesting correspondents - Auden, MacNeice, Joyce, Woolf, Orwell, Dirac (!) - just grows. Regrettably, there's an almost complete absence of correspondence with Vivienne, just as their marriage is breaking up, and, as always, the volume can only be read in small doses (there's still an awful lot of uninteresting stuff in there) but a great pleasure nonetheless.