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Long-awaited letters to throw new light on T S Eliot

Posted on 15 May 2006

One of the most important literary archives of the 20th Century, the bulk of which has been under wraps for more than 50 years, will soon be released.

A University of York academic will play a crucial role in making the letters of T S Eliot available to a wider public, and throwing new light on the poet's literary career.

After the poet's death, his widow, Valerie, took on the huge task of collecting, copying and transcribing, and dating his correspondence. As a result, a first volume of Eliot's letters was published in 1988, edited by Valerie Eliot, printing his surviving correspondence up to the publication of The Waste Land in late 1922.

Now Hugh Haughton, of the University's Department of English and Related Literature, has been called in, as co-editor with Valerie Eliot, to assist in taking the project on to the next stage - and putting several million of the poet's unpublished words into the public domain.

This is part of a larger project under the direction of the Eliot Estate and Faber and Faber, to publish a collected edition of all Eliot's prose (much of which has never been republished), and make his work available in new scholarly editions.

It will take the form of a multi-volume edition of all Eliot's surviving letters. Since the first volume came out in 1988, up to 200 more letters from the period up to 1923 have come to light. Hugh Haughton will assist Valerie Eliot in revising Volume One before embarking on two further volumes, which will include letters to major literary figures such as Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Paul Valéry.

Hugh Haughton said: "It's a quite extraordinary archive. Eliot was not only one of the great modern poets, but a critic, political commentator, editor, and dramatist. The correspondence documents his thinking about his work, the difficulties of his personal life with his first wife Vivien, and his close relationship to his family in the USA as well as his role as editor of The Criterion and literary editor at Faber, where he published Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, W H Auden and many others.

"The next volume also offers a unique record of his conversion to Christianity, and the development of his political and critical opinions, in the decade after The Waste Land.

It is great news that the doors are now opening on an archive which will change the way that Eliot is read, and understood.

Hugh Haughton

"It is great news that the doors are now opening on an archive which will change the way that Eliot is read, and understood. They will throw light on his relationships with major literary figures in the US, Britain, France and elsewhere, as well as on the development of perhaps the most influential literary career in modern times. Eliot scholarship in the last 20 years has drawn heavily on evidence in the first volume of the letters and this new material will help scholars to review Eliot's career in years to come."

Eliot, who once said a letter should be an 'indiscretion', was a prolific correspondent. In 1923 alone, he wrote 88,388 words, while in 1926 he wrote 112,878. Eliot's letters to Emily Hale, deposited with Princeton Library in the USA, remain under embargo until 2020, but meanwhile the edition will aim to reprint all of Eliot's surviving correspondence.

Two of Eliot's late forays into drama -- The Confidential Clerk and The Elder Statesman - give a sense of the way Hugh Haughton views his task.

"I have a huge amount of material to process, annotate and make sense of, which is daunting as well as exciting. In doing this, I see myself as the 'confidential clerk' to this particular 'elder statesman'," he said.