‘Shall these bones live?’: The Criterion in Crisis
At the beginning of 1928, Eliot was busy writing a new life. In fact, he was writing a new new life: ‘Ash-Wednesday […] was merely an attempt to do the verse of the Vita Nuova in English’, the poet would later write. READ
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.
The Letters of T. READ
Volume 3 of those letters collected online begins with an apology. Eliot writes to Natalie A. Duddington on 5 January 1926:
READ‘[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.’
READ‘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’.
2025 marks one hundred years since T. S. Eliot began his career in publishing. On 23rd April 1925, Eliot was invited to join the newly formed publishing house of Faber & Gwyer as one of its Directors by the firm’s Chairman, Geoffrey Faber. READ
The earliest surviving letter from T. S. Eliot was written in Gloucester, Massachusetts in June 1898. In the letter, addressed to his “Papa”, 9-year old Eliot writes of the coolness of the house in the morning, a broken microscope, butterfly and spider specimens, and hunting for birds with his sister, Charlotte. READ
An embroidery made by a young T. S. Eliot hinted at things to come. The embroidery, made in 1894, shows a ribbon-collared cat ready to pounce on a ball of wool. It’s believed Eliot first put pen to paper with his cats in a 1931 letter to his young godson, Tom Faber, who had written to Eliot about his cat. READ
During and shortly after the Second World War, T. S. Eliot was invited by the British Council to give lectures, poetry readings and open book exhibitions abroad. The visits were seen as a form of ‘cultural warfare’ at a time when much of Europe was at war. READ
In January 1948, T. S. Eliot was awarded the Order of Merit; in a letter congratulating him, W. H. Auden remarked ‘Now the next thing shall be the Nobel Prize’. Auden’s foretelling came true some months later when Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on 4th November 1948. READ
On Tuesday 16 May 2017, Ronald Schuchard gave the University of London International Programmes’ inaugural 1858 Charter Lecture, ‘Eliot in the Wartime Classroom, 1916–1919’. The lecture is reproduced here in full to coincide with the University of London’s publication of the lecture. READ
