Eliot Agonistes

T. S. Eliot was the most erudite, technically skilled, experimental, obscure, difficult, and influential twentieth-century American poet and critic. He could say, as James Joyce wryly remarked of Finnegans Wake, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant.” He sometimes complicated matters with deliberately misleading pronouncements. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” his frequently quoted papal bull of 1917, he insisted that poetry should be impersonal: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” In fact, his poems express his deepest suffering and agonized feelings. He confessed, “I am anything but an intellectual; more nearly a pure émotif” and tried to achieve simplicity by mastering his own emotions. In the greatest sleight-of-hand in twentieth-century poetry, Eliot portrayed his own private misery as the universal condition of modern man. Like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, Eliot was a prophet of depression and gloom who defined the mood of the modern age. He even surpassed Kafka’s anguished torment and foreshadowed Beckett’s grim, garbage-can view of human existence.

The massive amount of new material in the nearly three thousand pages of three volumes of letters, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden — withheld by his widow for twenty-three years after his death and finally edited by her — is most welcome. The letters contain important insights into the technique and style of his poetry: explanations of the elusive “Marina,” “Ash Wednesday,” Murder in the Cathedral, and “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Four Quartets; work as publisher at Faber & Faber and editor of the Criterion; principles of literary criticism and influence on other poets. They record his frantic moves to unsatisfactory flats around London, weeks spent ill in bed and formidable debt of £1,200 to Inland Revenue. They reveal a great deal about his character, friendships, and personal life: the aftermath of his refuge in the church and religious conversion in 1927 from non-Christian Unitarian to High Church Anglican, the return to America to lecture at Harvard and throughout the country, and his traumatic escape from Vivien, his mentally unstable wife.

Eliot’s religious humility improved his character and made him habitually polite, modest, generous, self-abasing, and self-scourging: a wise man and a kind man. But not to be trifled with, he was capable of forceful protests about slender emoluments, anger when his poetry was mangled, and fury when American publishers pirated his most valuable literary asset, The Waste Land. Many of the letters deal with rather dull publishing duties and ecclesiastical business, with many repetitions and apologies for unavoidable delays. He was not a great letter writer like Byron, Keats, and Lawrence. He lacked their personal and emotional revelations, wit and panache, sympathy and energy, intellectual audacity and imaginative intensity.

His closest friends, whom he addressed by their first names, were Ezra Pound, Leonard Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Herbert Read, and his publishing colleagues Geoffrey Faber and Frank Morley. He took frequent holidays with Faber in Wales and Morley in Surrey. Surprisingly, he was also close to Middleton Murry, who has now sunk into oblivion. His female correspondents — Virginia Woolf, Ottoline Morrell, and Mary Hutchinson — offered tea and sympathy for his Baudelairean Mon coeur mis à nu. He was extremely deferential to all clergymen — keen proselytizers, spiritual counselors, father confessors, brainy Jesuits, and lordly bishops — and was quite chummy with the Archbishop of Canterbury. He sometimes signed off archaically as “Your obedient servant.”

By contrast, he illustrated delightfully misspelled letters to the young sons of Geoffrey Faber. Unlike Frost, Stevens, Williams...