What do you think?
Rate this book
The Letters of T.S. Eliot #5
The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 5: 1930-1931
'The book amounts to a comprehensive literary history of the time .' David Sexton, Evening Standard
Volume 5 of The Letters of T. S. Eliot finds the poet, between the ages of forty-two and forty-four, reckoning with the strict implications of his Christian faith for his life, his work, and his poetry.
The letters between Eliot and his associates, family and friends - his correspondents range from the Archbishop of York and the American philosopher Paul Elmer More to the writers Virginia Woolf, Herbert Read and Ralph Hodgson - serve to illuminate the ways in which his Anglo-Catholic convictions could, at times, prove a self-chastising and even alienating force. 'Anyone who has been moving among intellectual circles and comes to the Church, may experience an odd and rather exhilarating feeling of isolation,' he remarks. Notwithstanding, he becomes fully involved in doctrinal he espouses the Church as an arena of discipline and order.
Eliot's relationship with his wife, Vivien, continues to be turbulent, and at times desperate, as her mental health deteriorates and the communication between husband and wife threatens, at the coming end of the year, to break down completely. At the close of this volume Eliot will accept a visiting professorship at Harvard University, which will take him away from England and Vivien for the academic year 1932-33.
Volume 5 of The Letters of T. S. Eliot finds the poet, between the ages of forty-two and forty-four, reckoning with the strict implications of his Christian faith for his life, his work, and his poetry.
The letters between Eliot and his associates, family and friends - his correspondents range from the Archbishop of York and the American philosopher Paul Elmer More to the writers Virginia Woolf, Herbert Read and Ralph Hodgson - serve to illuminate the ways in which his Anglo-Catholic convictions could, at times, prove a self-chastising and even alienating force. 'Anyone who has been moving among intellectual circles and comes to the Church, may experience an odd and rather exhilarating feeling of isolation,' he remarks. Notwithstanding, he becomes fully involved in doctrinal he espouses the Church as an arena of discipline and order.
Eliot's relationship with his wife, Vivien, continues to be turbulent, and at times desperate, as her mental health deteriorates and the communication between husband and wife threatens, at the coming end of the year, to break down completely. At the close of this volume Eliot will accept a visiting professorship at Harvard University, which will take him away from England and Vivien for the academic year 1932-33.
- GenresBiography
928 pages, Hardcover
First published November 18, 2014
3 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
T.S. Eliot
1,085 books5,663 followersThomas 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
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 25, 2017
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.
Displaying 1 of 1 review