How, amid his many preoccupations, did he find the time to sit at his typewriter or dictate to his office secretary hundreds of personal and professional letters? Or could managing a telephone directory not have sufficed instead of all this effort?
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Such questions inevitably arise as the reader engages with this massive volume, published in 2025 by Faber & Faber in London, spanning 1,080 pages. It is the tenth volume of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, a series that is being released sequentially and is expected to reach twenty volumes in total.
The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 10 (1942–1944)
The book was edited and extensively annotated by John Haffenden, Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, in collaboration with the late Valerie Eliot, the poet’s second wife and widow.
This volume covers the years 1942–1944 and is overshadowed by the specter of the Second World War, which affected all aspects of life in Britain. The letters refer to German air raids on London, Coventry, and other cities; food rationing; blackouts; difficulties in communicating with the outside world; and the disruption of artistic activities such as theater, cinema, exhibitions, and festivals. Paper shortages also affected the printing of books, magazines, and newspapers. This, in turn, impacted the publishing house where Eliot was one of the directors, forcing it to reduce its output and postpone many contracted works. As a result, many of these letters contain Eliot’s apologies for declining dozens of manuscripts submitted to the press—ranging from poetry collections and novels to short stories, plays, and critical studies—an outcome that must have caused deep disappointment among writers and critics who hoped to see their works published and endorsed by the most prominent Anglo-American poet of the twentieth century.
Eliot’s correspondence was addressed to family members such as his elder brother Henry, a scholar specializing in the archaeology of Assyria, Iran, and the Near East; Emily Hale, Eliot’s youthful love before his emigration from the United States to Britain; John Hayward, with whom Eliot once shared a residence in London; translators of his works into foreign languages; poets such as Saint-John Perse, W. H. Auden, and Stephen Spender; novelists including E. M. Forster, George Orwell, and Lawrence Durrell; playwrights Sean O’Casey and Ronald Duncan; film director George Hoellering, who adapted Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral into a film that met with Eliot’s approval; and critics such as I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, and Allen Tate, among many others.
These letters abound with Eliot’s commentary on literary works submitted to the publishing house, revealing his penetrating critical insight and his acute perception of strengths and weaknesses in contemporary literature. Even more importantly, they demonstrate his moral commitment and professional integrity. He read every word of each submitted text before passing judgment, showed no inclination toward flattery, accepted what deserved publication, rejected what did not, and urged writers to adhere to the highest standards of precision, sparing no effort to eliminate flaws and reinforce the positive aspects of their work.
Among the events recorded in the letters are Eliot’s service in civil defense during fires caused by German air raids on London; a five-week stay in Sweden; a trip to Wales in 1944; plans for journeys (never realized) to Iceland and North Africa; his refusal of an offer to serve as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; lectures he delivered; seminars he attended; radio talks he recorded; and theatrical and musical works he experienced, such as Strindberg’s Gustav, Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, the sculptures of Henry Moore, and musical works he loved, including Beethoven’s string quartets.
Scattered throughout the letters are significant critical views expressed by Eliot, such as his repetition of the French Symbolist poet Mallarmé’s dictum: “Poetry is made of words, not ideas,” adding, “A poem is, first and foremost, a form and a breathing of life into words.” Poetry, he argues, “requires careful selection, minimal use of metaphors and images, and giving each the maximum impact,” for “excessive ornamentation is the enemy of form.”
He also believed that a poet should write as little poetry as possible—quality matters more than quantity. In most poets, he observed, there is much dross and few pure veins. Versification, he maintained, “must at least be a craft before it becomes an art.” The letters also shed light on Eliot’s preferences and aversions. He preferred, for example, the sixteenth-century Portuguese poet Luís de Camões to the English poet Milton, and he mocked Milton’s depiction of hell in Paradise Lost.
Expressing his preference for past poetry over contemporary verse, Eliot remarked, “I doubt that I find much pleasure in any contemporary poetry—whether by my contemporaries or by those younger than myself.” He even went so far as to say—surely not to be taken literally—“I hate poetry,” writing the word HATE in capital letters for emphasis.
It is amusing to note that Eliot occasionally misspelled words, miswrote proper names, or erred in grammar—mistakes corrected by the editor John Haffenden. These lapses were clearly slips of the pen rather than ignorance. A writer of Eliot’s stature, alongside Joyce among the greatest users of the English language in our era, could hardly be unaware of correct usage. In this respect, one might recall the lines of Abu Firas al-Hamdani:
I slumber, yet do not yield the reins to passion,
And I falter, though the right path is never hidden from me.
The book is enriched with photographs of Eliot between the ages of fifty-three and fifty-six (the period during which the letters were written), covers of first editions of his books, images of his correspondents, a photograph of him recording a radio talk at the BBC studios in London with George Orwell, critic William Empson, Indian writer Mulk Raj Anand, and others, and a photograph from April 1943 showing Eliot reading a passage from The Waste Land in the presence of the Queen Mother (wife of King George VI and mother of Queen Elizabeth II), Princess Elizabeth (later Queen), and her sister Margaret. There is also an image of Eliot at work with his fellow directors at Faber & Faber shortly before the building was struck by a German bomb. Through this union of text and image, the reader gains a clear and vivid picture of the life, ideas, and human relationships of the poet of The Waste Land at a pivotal moment in his life and in the history of the twentieth century.
