Recent stories relating to TS Eliot
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Recording of T.S. Eliot made by Valerie Eliot released for first time, April 2025
“In 1925, it was, that I went with some trepidation to see Faber at his London home.”
So begins a recording, released for the first time, of T.S. Eliot in 1961, reading from his address for Geoffrey Faber’s memorial service.
Recorded in their home by Valerie Eliot, the recording has been released to celebrate the centenary on 23rd April of Eliot joining the newly formed publishing house of Faber & Gwyer as one of its Directors, at the invitation of the firm’s Chairman, Geoffrey Faber.
A fascinating article on tseliot.com, the website conceived by the T.S. Eliot Estate, explains how the first meeting between Eliot and Faber came about, and how Eliot’s entry into the world of publishing offered him both an escape from his job at Lloyds Bank, and better prospects for The Criterion. “I had more reason to be grateful to Faber at that time,” says Eliot, “than he ever knew.”
Geoffrey Faber died on Good Friday, 31st March 1961, and his memorial service was held on 10th May 1961. The article and recording are here.
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Rare private edition of poems from Eliot’s youth, April 2025
One of just twelve copies of a collection of poems from Eliot’s early youth is up for auction.
Poems Written in Early Youth was printed in 1950 with Eliot’s agreement, in a “tremendously private edition” by his Swedish publishers, Bonniers of Stockholm. It was edited with notes and an introduction initialled by John Hayward, who wrote that “No copies will be available to the public & as the edition will not be ‘published’, no copies will be sent to ‘copyright’ libraries in Sweden or abroad.” Georg Svensson of Bonniers wrote that “Eliot was so strict about this that…the Royal Librarian and the university libraries never got any.” (The Poems, p1066)
After Eliot’s death, Valerie published the text in 1967 through Faber & Faber, explaining in her introduction that “So much interest has been expressed in this collection, which was supervised by the author, that it seems wise to make it generally available as a corrective to the inaccurate, pirated versions.”
In an auction at Nosbüsch & Stucke in Berlin from 15-17 May, the copy – No 7 of the twelve – has a reserve of €1,600 and an estimate of €2,400 – details and images are here. ———————————————————————————————————-
Socrates and Christ in ‘East Coker’, April 2025
An essay in Antigone, “a new and open forum for Classics in the twenty-first century”, considers Socrates and Christ in East Coker IV.
In The Wounded Surgeon, Mateusz Stróżyński suggests that Eliot “invoke[s] the ancient and medieval view that the Classics should not be rejected, but preserved and made Christian.”
“Socrates argues that death is the greatest good for the soul,” he writes, “since it liberates it from the evil and disease caused by its excessive attachment to the body and the senses.” Stróżyński links this philosophy to the Passion as portrayed within the poem, and to figures such as the “wounded surgeon”, “ruined millionaire” and “dying nurse”.
He also illustrates how “The chill ascends from feet to knees” matches Plato’s description of the death of Socrates, and the manner in which the effect of his hemlock rose upwards from his feet.
Mateusz Stróżyński is a Classicist, philosopher, psychologist, and psychotherapist, working as an Associate Professor in the Institute of Classical Philology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland.The essay is here.
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Spring issue of Exchanges… April 2025
The Spring issue of our Society quarterly, Exchanges…, is now available for download.
Its contributions from members include an article on teaching Eliot in Communist China; thoughts on the Greek stem echoing in ‘Four Quartets’; and a visit to Burnt Norton “in search of the Rose Garden”.
You can download this new issue here.
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Books and cards inscribed by Eliot and his family, April 2025
The latest Modernisms catalogue from Blackwell’s Rare Books contains several items of Eliot interest.
They include a copy of a copy of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad inscribed to Charlotte, Eliot’s mother, “from Vivien and Tom” – as well as a copy of Charlotte’s own book, Savonarola: A Dramatic Poem, inscribed by Eliot’s sister-in-law Theresa.
There are also several signed greetings cards sent by Eliot to Lady Ottoline Morrell, and various books inscribed by Eliot, to Hope Mirrlees, Kenneth Pickthorn, Meg Nason and Lord Altrincham, with images and brief explanations provided in the catalogue of the roles each played in Eliot’s life.
You can download a PDF of the catalogue here.
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Letters of T.S. Eliot 1942-1944 for Summer publication, April 2025
The latest volume in the series of The Letters of T.S. Eliot has been announced for Summer publication by Faber.
Volume 10, edited as ever by the indefatigable John Haffenden, will cover the years 1942-1944. This is the period during which Eliot wrote ‘Little Gidding’; the publicity promises that “The series of letters to John Hayward, who advises him, is a tour de force of the art: full of news, merriment and mischief.”
The volume also “sees Eliot, at the height of the war, busily fighting for the cultural values of Europe. In an exhausting round of lecture tours, talks for the BBC, readings and addresses, and living with the constant threat of being bombed in London… Eliot remains stalwart.”
Priced at £60, the hardback volume of 1104 pages is currently scheduled for publication on 25th July.
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Multiple copies of The Waste Land to be sold, March 2025
An astonishing 34 fine copies of the first edition, second printing of The Waste Land are being sold together in the US.
These fine copies come from the private collection of Scofield Thayer, the editor of The Dial magazine, the first to publish the poem in the U.S. Two California firms – johnson rare books & archives and Owl Creek Books – acquired the volumes from relatives of Thayer who received them by descent. They are showing them at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair, and are selling them as a joint lot.
“How does someone end up with so many perfect copies of this important book?” said Brad Johnson, co-owner of johnson rare books & archives. “The immediate answer is inheritance, a metal box, and a dark closet.”
The Dial purchased 350 of the 1,000 first edition copies of The Waste Land, which Boni & Liveright published in 1922, and offered a copy of the book with a one-year subscription to the magazine. “In their own advertising, they noted: ‘It is sure to become a collector’s rarity in a short time,’” said Nathan Gabbard, owner of Owl Creek Books.
The 34 copies of the second printing are being offered for $125,000 –the same price as a single first printing offered by the same booksellers.
UPDATE: A fascinating article on the first printings of The Waste Land, and on Eliot’s relationship with Scofield Thayer, has been posted by Owl Creek Books here.
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Giles Coren ‘updates’ ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’, March 2025
In The Times, Giles Coren has written an ‘updated’ version of ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’.
“Poetry,” writes Coren, “according to The Times, is ‘enjoying a boom in France … driven by the need for a poetic response to an increasingly disorientating world’. Which is a shame, because French poetry is rubbish, whereas English poetry is great. Our major poems just need a few tweaks to bring them up to date, and you’ll find they respond more than adequately to the tribulations of the modern world.” His ‘tweaked’ version of ‘Prufrock’ follows…:
The Lunchtime of J Alfred Prufrock by Teacakes Sellalot
Let us go then, you and I,
When Greggs is open, for a chicken pie.
I’m impatient, let’s not bother with a table;
Let us chew and belch in public, in the streets,
Or on the Tube, begriming seats,
Or on the steps of Premier Inn hotels
And fastfood restaurants and Taco Bells:
Streets that follow like fat fools
Denying the seriousness of obesity in schools
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
When this disgusting stuff is banned, who’ll miss it?
In the room the women come and go
Slurping on their Frappuccino.
I grow fat, I grow fat.
Forget the bottoms of my trousers;
The only thing that fits me is my hat.
Shall I get a semaglutide jab? Do I dare to eat a Mac?
I shall wear elasticated trousers and have another snack.
I hear the Mermaids singing, or is that a heart attack?
I do not think that they will stay for tea.
The full article, which includes similarly updated versions of Marvell, Wordsworth, Larkin and Lewis Carroll, is (£) here.
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Édouard Glissant, T. S. Eliot, and Chinese Literary Modernism, March 2025
“How do modernist literary motifs, conventions, forms and concerns disseminate globally?” asks Dr Gavin Herbertson, of King’s College, London, in a short piece in The Modernist Review.
To explore this, he draws upon the cultural theories of Édouard Glissant. “Channelling Glissant,” he writes, “one could, for instance, consider the role Chinese and Japanese configurations of Buddhism played in relation to T. S. Eliot’s poetics.”
Herbertson examines the central arguments of ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ in this context, and perceives a contradiction, which “undermines Eliot’s own model, but is well accounted for by a Glissant-inflected paradigm.”
His short essay is here.
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Works on ‘The Waste Land’ republished as three separate books, March 2025
The works on ‘The Waste Land’ by WK Brannigan are being republished as three separate books.
A Modern Eve is described as “exploring the universal, mythic aspects of the typist in her relationship to the Hellenic poet Sappho and the Hebraic myth of Eve”.
The Dark Adam of Modernity “reveals the links between the carbuncle eyes of Satan in Paradise Lost, the sacred carbuncle gem in the Church of Magnus Martyr, and the clerk of The Waste Land.”
The Primal Chorus of the Sacred Wood “looks further into the distant past of humanity in The Waste Land, to the genesis of primeval culture. It explores how the beginnings of rhythm, dance, music, language and myth are represented in the poem, and how that flows into modernity.”
William K Brannigan completed an MA by Research at Durham University on Anarchy and the Violet Hour: Eve, Adam and the Cult of the Individual in The Waste Land, which provided the basis for the works, first published as two titles in May 2024 – see the 2024 News Archive for details. The works are now being published in three paperbacks by alep press, and details of each are here.
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Ralph Fiennes, Tarkovsky and ‘Little Gidding’, March 2025
Ralph Fiennes quotes from ‘Little Gidding’ in a short video item on art movies.
In the video, the actors Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, co-stars of The Return, select their favourite movies from the Criterion Collection of DVDs.
Selecting The Mirror by Andrey Tarkovsky, Binoche relates how Tarkovsky said “You know what? I found a new way to edit films and to put the end at the beginning. And that’s my new way of making films.”
“What we call the beginning is often the end,” responds Fiennes. “The end is where we start from.”
The short video is here and this exchange takes place appropriately near the end at 3:32.
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‘The Waste Land’ City church launches appeal, March 2025
The Church of St Magnus the Martyr, the City of London church known to many through ‘The Waste Land’, has launched an appeal for the restoration of its interiors.
Eliot wrote in ‘The Waste Land’ that “the walls of Magnus Martyr hold/Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold”. He also declared that “the interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren’s interiors.”
“The interiors at St Magnus were last fully repaired and redecorated in 1995-1996,” say the Rector and Churchwardens. “Since then almost thirty years of general wear and tear have taken their toll and the interiors are now in desperate need of redecoration.
“The works will revitalise and safe-guard a sacred space that is in full daily use for worship and prayer, as well as improving the church’s offer to visitors and tourists into the next 100 years.”
Full details of the appeal are here.
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Celebrating the centenary of T.S. Eliot joining Faber, March 2025
An event at the London Review of Books, featuring poet and critic Mark Ford; Editor of Eliot’s Letters Professor John Haffenden; former Faber managing director Toby Faber; and Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton Aakanksha Virkar, will mark the 100th anniversary on April 23rd of T. S Eliot entering the world of publishing by joining Faber & Gwyer.
Full details are on our Events page.
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The Modernist Long Poem – Conference and Call for Papers, March 2025
There is a Call for Papers for an autumn conference on the Modernist Long Poem.
The conference will be hosted by Northeastern University London on October 25th 2025, and abstracts for papers are invited by 25th April 2025.
“Just over a century after the publication of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the modernist long poem continues to be the focus of critical response and varied definitions,” say the organisers. “In the post-war decade, the long poem would become the dominant form of modernist poetics.”
“We hope to include papers foregrounding a wide range of approaches to and aspects of the long modernist poem.”
The keynote lecture for the conference will be delivered by Professor Steven Matthews (University of Reading), on ‘Logics of the Imagination: Structure in Eliot, Aldington, and H.D.’.
Full details of both the conference and the call for papers are here
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Richard Harries on T.S. Eliot’s Prose, February 2025
Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, has reviewed The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot in the Church Times.
“It is not just that [Eliot] seems to have read everything,” Harries writes, “he is capable of making the most astute judgements between one work and another, expressed in a way that is utterly lucid and often laced with irony.”
Harries, who gave the 2024 Annual TS Eliot Lecture presented by the Society, highlights “Eliot’s growing admiration for the writings of those who followed St Thomas Aquinas”; shorter pieces from The Criterion and the Christian News-Letter; and “his short introductions to the great Anglo-Catholic conferences of the inter-war years.”
“There are many perceptive insights,” he observes. “For example, his definition of a sceptic as someone ‘who suspects the origins of his own beliefs . . . who suspects other people’s motives because he has learnt the deceitfulness of his own.’”
The full review can be read here.
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First issue of The Criterion sold, February 2025
A copy of The Criterion, Vol 1 No 1, famously containing the first UK publication of ‘The Waste Land’, has been sold at auction.
Described as “an excellent and very clean example overall”, the copy had an estimate of £1,500 to £2,000. It sold in a timed auction at Forum Auctions for £3,800, with an added buyer’s premium of 26% meaning £4,788 to its purchaser.
Details of the lot are here.
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Winter issue of Exchanges…, February 2025
The Winter issue of our Society quarterly, Exchanges…, is now available for download.
Its contributions from members include an item on an Eliot-based novel, A Passion for Tom; a visit to Kipling’s former home, revealing a connection to Eliot’s Skimbleshanks; and a fascinating find related to Eliot’s anonymous second book, Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry.
You can download this new issue here.
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C.K Stead on Eliot’s Collected Prose, February 2025
C.K. Stead, the New Zealand writer and critic now 92, has weighed into the ongoing discussion of Eliot’s prose in Letters to the Editor of the TLS.
Stead writes that Stephen Romer, the TLS reviewer of The Collected Prose, “doesn’t suggest that Eliot’s progress as critic exactly matches his progress as poet, but I think it does.
“If Eliot had died leaving The Waste Land (the great English-language poem of its century), with his principal poetic eructations of that period, some finely lyrical, some sadly self-characterizing, some indelibly antisemitic, together with his critical writing of those years, he would still have been a major event in literary history, and we would have been spared the Eliot (as Wyndham Lewis put it) “disguised as Westminster Abbey”, the poems in which the authentic Eliot-self wrestled dismally with the Anglican Other”.
His letter can be read in full here.
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Eliot typescript posted online, February 2025
As part of their centenary, the Virginia Quarterly Review has posted online, courtesy of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia, the first page of Eliot’s amended 13-page typescript of his essay, ‘Personality and Demonic Possession’ (1934).
This was Part III of After Strange Gods, the book which Eliot withdrew from publication. Described as “the least incendiary of the three lectures”, the essay appeared in VQR in January 1934.
The larger image in VQR is here and the essay itself is now in the online Complete Prose 5, 38 and in Collected Prose II, 795.
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T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and ‘Little Gidding’, February 2025
An essay in the latest issue of Essays in Criticism considers
‘Double Parts: Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, and the Approach to Joyce’.
“There is good reason to propose,” writes David Pascoe, of Utrecht University, “that, as a result of the ‘sharpening of personal poignancy’ which, at an early stage in its composition Eliot had told Hayward Section II of ‘Little Gidding’ still required, the ‘familiar’ figure of Joyce should be encountered too, ‘a double part’ within its ‘compound ghost’.”
The essay traces the closeness and complexity of the friendship between Eliot and Joyce, as Eliot pursued across meetings, meals and letters the completion of Joyce’s Work in Progress, which Faber eventually published as Finnegans Wake; “a friendship… which would sustain Joyce as the most turbulent period in his life began.”
He explores the notion of a ‘double standard’ which Eliot asserted during a lecture in Dublin, that whatever Joyce’s “conscious attitude” towards his faith, because of his education “The mind exhibited in the work remains profoundly Catholic and religious”.
He considers whether the ‘one who died blind and quiet’ might be Joyce as well as Milton. And he highlights a series of echoes between ‘Little Gidding’ and Finnegans Wake, “a text in which, famously, the ‘double ends’ joined, that final form also recalled in the opening lines of ‘Little Gidding’s closing section: ‘What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning / The end is where we start from’.”
The essay is published in Essays in Criticism (Vol 74 Issue 4) here.
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Observations inspired by The Collected Prose, February 2025
The review in the TLS of The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot (scroll down three items) has resulted in three Letters to the Editor in the subsequent issue.
Dominic Hartley laments the absence of a critical apparatus, and highlights “an absolute howler” which Eliot commits in his essay on Thomas Heywood but which passes unremarked. “There are more of these surprising lapses,” he writes, “of which even the learned readers who have forked out £200 for the handsome Faber set may not be aware.”
Sam Milne writes to counter the reviewer’s observation that Eliot had an “allergy to DH Lawrence and his works”. Milne quotes Eliot responding to a comment by Lawrence about “the essence of poetry”, in which Lawrence calls for “stark, bare, rocky directness of statement”. Eliot remarks that “This speaks to me of that at which I have long aimed,” and concludes that “Lawrence’s words mean this to me, that they express to me what I think that the forty or fifty original lines that I have written strive towards.”
Finally, Bernard Richards, of Brasenose College, Oxford, considers the reviewer’s remarks on what Eliot thought about the identity and functioning of a poet. Richards recalls being told of a party at which Eliot had requested “ice cream and hot chocolate sauce”.
“A guest said, ‘I can’t imagine how you’d like that’.
“Eliot replied, ‘You’re not a poet; of course you can’t imagine it.’”
The TLS Letters to the Editor page (£) is here.
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“She’s a story worth telling” – Emily Hale and TS Eliot, January 2025
In an interview for HUB History, author Sara Fizgerald provides a summary of the life of Emily Hale and her relationship with T.S. Eliot, drawn from her recent book, The Silenced Muse: Emily Hale, T.S. Eliot and the Role of a Lifetime.
A Boston-based podcast, “In every episode of HUB History, host Jake shares a fascinating story from the long history of Boston.” In this episode, “From Hale’s upbringing in Chestnut Hill to their first flirtation in a Harvard Square parlor, Fitzgerald traces the intertwining lives of Hale and Eliot over a half a century that revolves around the intellectual center of gravity that is Boston.”
Conveniently, the HUB History site provides not only a link to the podcast, but also a transcript of the interview. Both are available here.
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‘Child ghosts’ in the gardens of Burnt Norton, January 2025
An essay by Catherine Butler, ‘Heard but not seen: Gardens and their child ghosts in Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot and Lucy M. Boston’, argues that “All three understand the complexity and importance of gardens as places poised between nature and artifice, present and past, childhood and experience.”
Catherine Butler is a Professor of English Literature at Cardiff University, specialising in children’s literature. She argues that the influence of Rudyard Kipling’s story ‘They’ upon ‘Burnt Norton’ “should not be underestimated”, and identifies “significant continuities” between the two works.
The essay can be downloaded in PDF from ORCA: Online Research at Cardiff, and the section Garden Ghosts in ‘Burnt Norton’begins on page 16.
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The TLS reviews The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot, January 2025
In the TLS of 24th January, Stephen Romer provides a full-length review of The Collected Prose of T.S. Eliot.
Much of the review considers the content and structure which result from Archie Burnett’s editorial criteria, with inevitable comparison to the online Complete Prose. However, Romer goes on to look at the “most astute” activity contained within the first volume, and examines in particular Eliot’s previously uncollected essay on ‘Modern Tendencies in Poetry’.
“Much in the second and third volumes,” he then writes,”…is heavy going. Once the settled belief is in, the existential tension goes out, and this is reflected in the prose, which often turns into long-winded polemic and attempts at defining ‘What Precisely and If and Perhaps and But’.” He detects a “chill whiff of churchiness” in the “endless” pages of support for Christian institutions.
“Taking the critical prose as a whole,” he asks, “if we seek for constants in his thought, or for things of permanent value, to use a favourite phrase, what might we find? Brilliant insights, to be sure; a genius for the apt quotation; forensic analysis of particular examples. In short, Eliot demonstrates literary discrimination of the first order, carried out over an immense range.” And he observes that “unlike other minds, Eliot never in fact lays down exclusive prescriptions about what poetry is or ought to be.”
The full review (£) is here – see the archived News 2024 page (below) for links to other reviews (August 2024), and to July 2024 for details of the content and volumes of The Collected Prose.
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T.S. Eliot and Kelham Hall, January 2025
A book by Vincent Strudwick traces the influence of the Society of the Sacred Mission on T. S. Eliot’s poetry and personal spiritual journey.
Eliot’s Transitions: T. S. Eliot’s Search for Identity and the Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham Hall examines the influence of members of the Society of the Sacred Mission at Kelham Hall on T. S. Eliot’s poetics, cultural criticism and his search for identity. It focusses particularly on Eliot’s friendship with Br George Every SSM, and the correspondence between them that led to a deep intellectual and spiritual relationship.
Reverend Canon Dr Vincent Strudwick was awarded a Lambeth doctorate in 2009 and is a fellow of Rewley and Kellogg Colleges, Oxford
“The result is a delicate journey through the growing personal and spiritual relationship between a great theologian and Christian writer, and one of the greatest modern poets and essayists.”
Published by SLG Press with a cover price of £9.50, full details are here.
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The Cocktail Party inscribed to Allen Tate, January 2025
A First Edition of The Cocktail Party, inscribed by Eliot to the American poet, essayist and commentator Allen Tate, is being sold by Sotheby’s.
The inscription “To Allen Tate from T.S. Eliot” is dated “6.iii.50”, significant because this Faber & Faber First Edition of the play was not published until three days later, on 9th March 1950.
Tate was a close friend of Eliot, and collected essays and personal reminiscences from contemporary literary figures after Eliot’s death; these appeared first in the Sewanee Review, and subsequently in Tate’s book T.S. Eliot: The Man and His Work (Chatto & Windus, 1967).
In his own postscript to that collection he wrote, “To see his maestro, Dante had to ‘lift his eyelids a little higher’, and that was what I knew, after January fourth, I had been doing in the thirty-six years of an acquaintance that almost imperceptibly became friendship. I looked up to him, and in doing so I could not feel myself in any sense diminished.”
The book is offered by Sotheby’s in a private sale here.
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Filmed performance of Four Quartets, January 2025
A film of a performance from memory of Four Quartets by the actor, theatre impresario and West End producer Peter Wilson has been made available online. The film had its world premiere at the Autumn Festival of Norfolk last year.
“In the last few years of this life, before his untimely death from cancer in 2023, Peter Wilson took on the challenge of learning the poems and giving public performances of them,” explain Dartmouth Films. “In this film, directed by his friend David Rocksavage and set in West Rudham church in Norfolk, Peter gives his last public performance as an actor, capturing the inner voice of what was the poet’s own final poetic statement.”
Details of the film are here and it can be viewed here.
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On Margate Sands, January 2025
The Nayland Rock Shelter in Margate, where TS Eliot wrote part of The Waste Land, has been reopened after a £90,000 refurbishment.
The Grade II listed shelter, offering a view of Margate Sands, was constructed between 1872 and 1896. It was previously restored in 2000, but was severely damaged by vandalism and fire in 2023. The shelter was closed in April 2024, and work has included repairing the wooden flooring, and removing the fire-damaged seating area, and replacing it in line with the structure’s listed status. Repairs to the roof were completed earlier this month, and lights have been installed inside the shelter, activated by an automatic timer, to deter further anti-social behaviour.
“I have done a rough draft of part of part III [of The Waste Land ],” wrote Eliot from Margate in a letter of November 1921, “but do not know whether it will do…I have done this while sitting in a shelter on the front – as I am out all day except when taking rest.”
“The shelter is a genuine part of Margate’s coastal heritage,” said Councillor Steve Albon, “and its links with TS Eliot make it even more important.” The shelter is now open again to visitors.
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T.S. Eliot’s letters and photos from his “very memorable” visit to Little Gidding, January 2025
Letters and photographs with significant connections to Eliot’s visit to Little Gidding are up for auction. The letters are to Hugh Fraser Stewart and his wife Jessie, who took Eliot on his only visit in 1936.
In a handwritten letter to Mrs Stewart, dated “29 V 36”, on Faber & Faber notepaper, Eliot describes his visit to Little Gidding as “a very memorable day in my life”, and encloses “my bad snapshots” of the church. There are four 70 x 45mm black and white photographs of St John’s Church, Little Gidding (plus one unidentified), presumably taken by Eliot himself.
And in a subsequent typed letter dated “3 January 1941” to “My dear Stewart”, Eliot refers to “a set of four poems”, “of which the last is intended to be ‘Little Gidding’. So you see that the excursion on which you took me was one of permanent importance to me.”
Eliot also thanks Stewart for his comments on an unnamed poem: “one needs all the encouragement one can get, in these days,” he writes, “for continuing this strange occupation of verbal play which never seems to have any immediate value”.
The letters and photographs are in The Oxford Library Sale at Mallams, Oxford on 30th January, with an estimate of £3,000 – £5,000. Full details and images are here.
UPDATE: The lot sold for £5,600 
(£7,000 including buyer’s premium)
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Eliot etching for sale, January 2025
An example of the 1934 portrait of TS Eliot by Edgar Holloway (1914-2008) is up for auction.
The framed etching in wove is numbered 35 out of an edition of 75, and is signed in pencil.
Edgar Holloway achieved critical acclaim while still in his teens, with Eliot, Stephen Spender and Herbert Read among the personalities he captured on copper and paper. By the age of twenty, he had been given two solo exhibitions in London, his work had been purchased by the V&A and the British Museum,
The estimate by auctioneers Roseberys London is £100-£200, and details are here.
UPDATE: This item went unsold.
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International TS Eliot Society Call for Papers, January 2025
The International TS Eliot Society has issued a Call for Papers to be presented at its Annual Meeting, to be held at Trinity College, Dublin from 2nd – 5th July 2025.
“Clearly organized proposals of about 300 words (submitted in MS Word, Google Docs, or PDF form), on any topic reasonably related to Eliot, along with brief biographical sketches, should be emailed by April 1st to tseliotsociety@gmail.com, with the subject heading “conference proposal.” Proposals related to Eliot’s connections to Ireland and Irish writers are especially welcome.
“Each year the Society presents the Fathman Young Scholar Award to the best paper given by a new Eliot scholar. Graduate students and recent PhDs are eligible (degree received in 2021 or later for those not yet employed in a tenure-track position; 2023 or later for those holding a tenure-track position). If you are eligible for the award, please mention this fact in your submission. The award, which includes a monetary prize, will be announced at the final session of the meeting.”
The event will also offer discussion-based peer seminars (on its first day), and the event’s keynote speaker will be Fran Brearton, Professor of English at Queen’s University Belfast. Primary conference lodging is being provided by Trinity College at special conference rates.
The full CFP is here, and details of the meeting, which will be updated as confirmed, are here.
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