International T. S. Eliot Summer School 2027 Winter Session

The T. S. Eliot International Summer School has announced the third annual winter session, an exclusive, one-day seminar designed to foster collaboration, share research, and support new emerging scholarship on Eliot’s work. Open to participants at any level, the winter session offers a taste of the summer school, introducing students to the kinds of conversations, texts, and approaches they can encounter in Oxford every July. READ

T. S. Eliot Lecture 2026 with Zadie Smith

The eleventh annual T. S. Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin will be delivered by Zadie Smith.

The evening will be introduced by Abbey Theatre Artistic Director Caitríona McLaughlin, followed by a reading of T. S. Eliot’s Preludes by Marty Rea. READ

Valerie Eliot’s Centenary

 To mark the centenary of Valerie Eliot’s birth, on 17 August 1926, we reproduce here John Haffenden’s essay on Valerie, featured in volume five of The Letters of T. S. Eliot.

 

 

Valerie Eliot: Editing the Letters

 

The Letters of T. READ

Guide to the Online Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 3: 1926-1927

Volume 3 of those letters collected online begins with an apology. Eliot writes to Natalie A. Duddington on 5 January 1926:

‘[I] am writing immediately to explain to you the position with regard to your translation of Bunin’s ‘A Night at Sea’ which I accepted for the Criterion […] During the whole of the summer, negotiations were proceeding for the transfer of the publication of the Criterion from Mr Cobden-Sanderson to Messrs Faber & Gwyer Limited.’

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Four Quartets at Marylebone Theatre

Marylebone Theatre is hosting a programme of music and spoken word featuring readings from Four Quartets.

The programme weaves music by Purcell, Haydn, Beethoven, Dowland, Locke, and Britten with two poems from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, read by A. N. READ

This is the way the world ends: The Hollow Men at 100

‘This volume contains nothing new except a set of poems called ‘The Hollow Men’, which represents an even more advanced stage of the condition of demoralization already given expression in The Waste Land; the last of these poems — the disconnected thoughts of a man lying awake at night — consists merely of the barest statement of a melancholy self-analysis mixed with a fragment of the Lord’s Prayer and a morose parody of ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’.

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T. S. Eliot Lecture 2025 with Colm Tóibín

The tenth annual T. S. Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theater, Dublin will be delivered by Colm Tóibín.

The evening will be introduced by the Abbey Theatre’s artistic director Caitríona McLaughlin, interspersed with readings by Cathy Belton, and followed by a conversation with James Shapiro. READ