The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 2: 1923-1925

Description

T.S. Eliot's widow has been working on her husband's letters for three decades, and this is the second of five volumes, for the first of which she won the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize. The material has been assembled from collections, libraries, sale rooms, archives and private sources all over the world, and Valerie Eliot has also drawn extensively upon her own archive in London. From the start of the period covered by this volume, the Eliots entered upon several years of anxiety and financial hardship. The strains of his job at Lloyds Bank, with virtually every evening and weekend spent writing, added to the pressures on the marriage, and on their health. It was in these circumstances that, as the letters show, Eliot wrote "Sweeney Agonistes" and "The Hollow Men". He also began to be drawn to the religious life, and at the end of the period covered by this volume he was baptized and confirmed in the Church of England, a step which shocked or alienated many admirers. In 1925 Eliot had left the bank after ten years to join the new publishers, Faber and Gwyer, and in 1927 he became a British citizen.

T.S. Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri in 1888. He settled in England in 1915, the year in which he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood. In 1919 Poems was hand-printed by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. His first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood, appeared in 1920. His most famous work, The Waste Land, was published in 1922. The poem was included in the first issue of his journal The Criterion, which he founded and edited. Three years later he became a director of Faber and Gwyer, later Faber and Faber. His Poems 1909-25 was one of the original titles published by Geoffrey Faber's new firm, and the basis of his standard Collected Poems 1909-1962. Ash Wednesday was published in 1930. In 1939 The Family Reunion and his children's classic Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats were published. His masterpiece Four Quartets began with 'Burnt Norton' in 1936, continued with 'East Coker'