The Letters Of T S Eliot Volume 3 1926 1927

In the period covered by this richly detailed collection, which brings the poet to the age of forty, T.S. Eliot was to set a new course for his life and work. Forsaking the Unitarianism of his American forebears, he was received into the Church of England and naturalised as a British citizen - a radical and public alteration of the intellectual and spiritual direction of his career. The demands of Eliot's professional life as writer and editor became more complex and exacting during these years. The celebrated but financially-pressed periodical he had been editing since 1922 - The Criterion - switched between being a quarterly and a monthly, before being rescued by the fledgling house of Faber & Gwyer. In addition to writing numerous essays and editorials, lectures, reviews, introductions and prefaces, his letters show Eliot involving himself wholeheartedly in the business of his new career as a publisher. His Ariel poems, Journey of the Magi (1927) and A Song for Simeon (1928) established a new manner and vision for the poet of The Waste Land and 'The Hollow Men'. These are also the years in which Eliot published two sections of an exhilaratingly funny, savage, jazz-influenced play-in-verse - 'Fragment of a Prologue' and 'Fragment of an Agon' - which were subsequently brought together as Sweeney Agonistes. In addition, he struggled to translate the remarkable work Anabase, by St.-John Perse, which was to be a signal influence upon his own later poetry. This correspondence with friends and mentors vividly documents all the stages of Eliot's personal and artistic transformation during these crucial years, the continuing anxieties of his private life, and the forging of his public reputation.

T. S. Eliot's career as a successful stage dramatist gathers pace throughout the fascinating letters of this volume. Following his early experimentation with the dark comedy Sweeney Agonistes (1932), Eliot is invited to write the words of an ambitious scenario sketched out by the producer-director E. Martin Browne (who was to direct all of Eliot's plays) for a grand pageant called The Rock (1934). The ensuing applause leads to a commission from the Bishop of Chichester to write a play for the Canterbury Festival, resulting in the quasi-liturgical masterpiece of dramatic writing, Murder in the Cathedral (1935). A huge commercial success, it remains in repertoire after eighty years.Even while absorbed in time-consuming theatre work, Eliot remains untiring in promoting the writers on Faber's ever broadening lists - George Barker, Marianne Moore and Louis MacNeice among them. In addition, Eliot works hard for the Christian Church he has espoused in recent years, serving on committees for the Church Union and the Church Literature Association, and creating at Faber & Faber a book list that embraces works on church history, theology and liturgy. Having separated from his wife Vivien in 1933, he is anxious to avoid running into her; but she refuses to comprehend that her husband has chosen to leave her and stalks him across literary society, leading to his place of work at the offices of Faber & Faber. The correspondence draws in detail upon Vivien's letters and diaries to provide a picture of her mental state and way of life - and to help the reader to appreciate her thoughts and feelings.

Volume One of the Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot in 1988, covered the period from Eliot's childhood in St Louis, Missouri, to the end of 1922, by which time he had settled in England, married and published The Waste Land. Since 1988, Valerie Eliot has continued to gather materials from collections, libraries and private sources in Britain and America, towards the preparation of subsequent volumes of the Letters edition. Among new letters to have come to light, a good many date from the years 1898-1922, which has necessitated a revised edition of Volume One, taking account of approximately two hundred newly discovered items of correspondence. The new letters fill crucial gaps in the record, notably enlarging our understanding of the genesis and publication of The Waste Land. Valuable, too, are letters from the earlier and less documented part of Eliot's life, which have been supplemented by additional correspondence from family members in America.

Volume 4 of the letters of T. S. Eliot, which brings the poet, critic, editor and publisher into his forties, documents a period of anxious and fast-moving professional recovery and personal and spiritual consolidation. Following the withdrawal of financial support by his patron Lady Rothermere, Faber & Gwyer (subsequently Faber & Faber) eventually takes over the responsibility for Eliot's literary periodical The Criterion. He supplements his income as a fledgling publisher, 'just as I did ten years ago, by reviewing, articles, prefaces, lectures, broadcasting talks, and anything that turns up.' His work as editor is internationalist above all else, and Eliot makes contact with a number of eminent and emergent writers and thinkers, as well as forging links with European reviews ('all of which have endeavoured to keep the intellectual blood of Europe circulating throughout the whole of Europe'). Eliot's responsibilities during this period extend to caring for Vivien, who returns home after months in a French psychiatric hospital and whom he looks after with anxious fortitude; and the personal correspondence with his mother closes with her death in September 1929.

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 controversy: 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 Two covers the early years of his editorship of The Criterion (the periodical that Eliot launched with Lady Rothermere's backing in 1922), publication of The Hollow Men and the course of Eliot's thinking about poetry and poetics after The Waste Land. The correspondence charts Eliot's intellectual journey towards conversion to the Anglican faith in 1927, as well as his transformation from banker to publisher, ending with his appointment as a director of the new publishing house of Faber & Gwyer, in late 1925, and the appearance of Poems 1909-1925, Eliot's first publication with the house with which he would be associated for the rest of his life. It was partly because of Eliot's profoundly influential work as cultural commentator and editor that the correspondence is so prolific and so various, and Volume Two of the Letters fully demonstrates the emerging continuities between poet, essayist, editor and letter-writer.

In the period covered by this richly detailed collection, T. S. Eliot was to set a new course for his life and work. The demands of his professional life as writer and editor became more complex and exacting. The celebrated but financially-pressed periodical he had been editing since 1922—The Criterion: A Literary Review—switched between being a quarterly and a monthly; in addition to writing numerous essays and editorials, lectures, reviews, introductions and prefaces, his letters show Eliot involving himself wholeheartedly in the business of his new career as a publisher. This correspondence with friends and mentors vividly documents all the stages of Eliot’s personal and artistic transformation during these crucial years, the continuing anxieties of his private life, and the forging of his public reputation.

V.6: "The letters of T. S. Eliot collected in this sixth volume were written during the years the Nobel Prize-winning poet, playwright, critic, and essayist called, "the happiest I can ever remember in my life." Penned in large part during his tour of Depression Era America, these letters reflect Eliot's resolve to end his torturous eighteen-year marriage to his wife, Vivienne, and offer fascinating descriptions of the author's encounters with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Marianne Moore, and other notable figures"--Amazon.com.