The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1: 1898-1922 Volume 1

By Valerie Eliot and T.S. Eliot

Book Overview

In two highly anticipated volumes, the correspondence of the twentieth century's eminent man of letters, from youth to early manhood

Volume One: 1898-1922 presents some 1,400 letters encompassing the years of Eliot's childhood in St. Louis, Missouri, through 1922, by which time the poet had settled in England, married his first wife, and published The Waste Land. Since the first publication of this volume in 1988, many new materials from British and American sources have come to light. More than two hundred of these newly discovered letters are now included, filling crucial gaps in the record and shedding new light on Eliot's activities in London during and after the First World War.

Volume Two: 1923-1925 covers the early years of Eliot's editorship of The Criterion, publication of The Hollow Men, and his developing thought about poetry and poetics. The volume offers 1,400 letters, charting Eliot's journey toward conversion to the Anglican faith, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher and his appointment as director of the new publishing house Faber & Gwyer. The prolific and various correspondence of this volume testifies to Eliot's growing influence as cultural commentator and editor.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300176457
• ISBN13: 9780300176452
• Release Date: September 2011
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 912 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.3" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

even famous people have problems

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (the source of the long running Broadway musical CATS). Murder in the Cathedral. The Waste Land. The Cocktail Party. Prufrock. The Hollow Men. All books I'd heard of or had to read in school --some I actually enjoyed--all written by T.S. Eliot, winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize for literature. An American with an advanced case of anglophilia who went to Britain as a student and basically never went back. Marrying an unsuitable woman -his former secretary- may have had something to do with it (like Princess Di she was high strung and couldn't cope with the duties that came along with her husband's professional and social position). It's interesting to see that poetry is a business like any other in that inspiration is maybe 1% and hard work makes up the other 99% (would you believe a famous literary battle about how to position on a page the words in a poem?). Money problems, literary feuds, the miserable business of publishing a magazine where you think your partners are about to screw you financially, it's all there. A nice friendship with a female cousin and a Frenchman who wrote beautiful letters. Begging letters to mom and then to an older brother for money. Somehow the life of one of the early 20th century's greatest poets and man of letters is very prosaic.(Thank goodness we are spared Eliot's letters to his wine supplier which made up a considerable proportion of the correspondence of Lewis Carroll (author on Alice in Wonderland!). Still, worth reading for T. S. Eliot's nice way with words even in the most ordinary correspondence.

a poet in his prose

No biography of Eliot could better capture the thoughts and personality of the young poet than these letters. Eliot had a lively correspondence with so many, including family, friends, editors, and partners in verse. Even the short letters -- like the ones in which Eliot simply announces to his correspondent that he's exhausted and doesn't want to write anything -- give a glimpse of how Old Possum acted.Eliot's poetry is so cerebral and allusive that when reading it, one can feel at his mercy. In his letters he is far less in control, and the contrast is fascinating.