[Download] "Eliot Shadows: Autography and Style in the Hollow Men (T. S. Eliot) (Critical Essay)" by Yeats Eliot Review # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Eliot Shadows: Autography and Style in the Hollow Men (T. S. Eliot) (Critical Essay)
- Author : Yeats Eliot Review
- Release Date : January 22, 2007
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 219 KB
Description
Locked up in an archive at Princeton University and sealed by order until 1 January 2020, the letters of Thomas Stearns Eliot to Emily Hale, upwards of a thousand, currently sit gathering dust. Hale was an intimate of Eliot's, who Ronald Bush ambiguously describes as "'more than a companion, less than a fiancee" (185), and as a result these letters seem to offer a whiff of scandal more than any currently available Eliot document. Likely against Eliot's wishes, Hale donated them to the library, compromising by having them sealed for fifty years. They are of such great interest that they were displayed boxed and banded in 2000 at a Princeton Library exhibit showing off its collections. The unavailability of such documents pertaining to this pillar of twentieth-century poetry has sparked some predictable speculation. In a 1973 biography, for example, T. S. Matthews imagines Hale's response to Eliot's first marriage in terms befitting a soap-opera: "This was a rude interruption of their intimacy, but no more than an interruption" (140). At the end of Martha Cooley's 1998 novel, The Archivist, the protagonist, who is entrusted to safeguard the letters, burns them (after reading them of course). In general, the letters salaciously seem to promise Eliot's most private thoughts and feelings regarding the developing problems with his first wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, perhaps in relation to his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927. And although they reportedly cover a broader period of time, they seem to promise a glimpse of Eliot in his weakest moments.