Category: From the Archive

‘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 23^rd 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