On this week’s E-book Membership podcast, we’re speaking concerning the life and loves of the best poet of the 20th century. Professor John Haffen
On this week’s E-book Membership podcast, we’re speaking concerning the life and loves of the best poet of the 20th century. Professor John Haffenden joins me to debate the influence of the opening of an archive of greater than 1,000 of Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale — his Harvard sweetheart and the lady who for fifteen years he believed to have been the love of his life. Was he actually in love along with her or, as he later claimed, merely imagining it? What does he imply when he says that marriage to Emily would have killed him as a poet? And what gentle does it shed on his poetry? John — who because the editor of T. S. Eliot’s collected letters is likely one of the first folks to have had entry to this trove — says that it’s an ‘astonishing’ haul, and reveals Eliot opening up as by no means earlier than.