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

The Letters of T.S. Eliot #5

by T.S. Eliot, Valerie Eliot (Editor), John Haffenden (Editor)

This fifth volume of the collected letters of poet, playwright, essayist, and literary critic Thomas Stearns Eliot covers the years 1930 through 1931. It was during this period that the acclaimed American-born writer earnestly embraced his newly avowed Anglo-Catholic faith, a decision that earned him the antagonism of friends like Virginia Woolf and Herbert Read. Also evidenced in these correspondences is Eliot’s growing estrangement from his wife Vivien, with the writer’s newfound dedication to the Anglican Church exacerbating the unhappiness of an already tormented union.   Yet despite his personal trials, this period was one of great literary activity for Eliot. In 1930 he composed the poems Ash-Wednesday and Marina, and published Coriolan and a translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabase the following year. As director at the British publishing house Faber & Faber and editor of The Criterion, he encouraged W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis MacNeice, and Ralph Hogdson, published James Joyce’s Haveth Childers Everywhere, and turned down a book proposal from Eric Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell. Through Eliot’s correspondences from this time the reader gets a full-bodied view of a great artist at a personal, professional, and spiritual crossroads. 

Genres: Biography

926 pages, Kindle Edition

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.