Overview

'What is accomplished by this sort of cultural warfare is impossible to say: but it [is] a part of total warfare which one must, as an individual, accept one's part in.' At the height of the Second World War, T. S. Eliot commits himself to fighting for the cultural values of Europe. He goes on a lecture tour of Sweden; he writes talks for the BBC; he reads poems for the Czechoslovak Centre, for 'Aid to Russia' and for the 'French in Britain Fund'. He lectures on 'The Music of Poetry' in Glasgow; addresses the Classical Association; talks at the 'Moot', and visits organisations including the Anglo-Swedish Society and the British-Norwegian Institute; and he works for the Christian News-Letter. He serves as President of the English Circle of 'Books Across the Sea' and as first President of the Virgil Society. He feels exhausted by travel and performance but remains stalwart. And always there is the threat in London - he has 'no regular habitation' - of being bombed: 'I have taken . . . to sleeping in my teeth.' Contacts and correspondents during these dark days include the film director George Hollering for whom he struggles to adapt his play Murder in the Cathedral, Kenneth Clark, Henry Moore, David Jones, William Empson, Mary Trevelyan, Karl Mannheim, Louis MacNeice, Elizabeth Bowen, M. J. Tambimuttu, Edith Sitwell and Reinhold Niebuhr. Notable poets recruited to the Faber fold include Lawrence Durrell, Anne Ridler and Norman Nicholson. Eliot's own creative energies are focused on completing Little Gidding, the final poem of the supernal sequence Four Quartets. The series of letters to John Hayward, who advises him, is a tour de force of the art: full of news, merriment and mischief.

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Valerie Eliot was twice winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize - for T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land: a Facsimile & Transcripts of the Original Drafts (1971) and The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (1988). She gathered up most of the letters for succeeding volumes of Eliot's Letters before her death in 2012. John Haffenden is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield; Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London; Fellow of the British Academy; and International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His publications include a biography of the American poet John Berryman; editions of the works of William Empson including the Complete Poems (2000); and an award-winning two-volume biography of Empson (2005, 2006). He was General Editor of The Letters of T. S. Eliot, volumes 1 and 2; and co-editor of volumes 3 (2011), 4 (2013), 5 (2014), 6 (2015), 7 (2017), 8 (2019), and 9 (2021).

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