Recent stories relating to TS Eliot
———————————————————————————————————-
Books from T.S. Eliot’s library, March 2026
In celebration of World Book Day, the T.S. Eliot Foundation posted this “shelfie” image of novels from Eliot’s own library.
“The volumes include Gulliver’s Travels, The House of Seven Gables, Maigret S’Amuse, and Don Quixote.”
———————————————————————————————————-
Manor house where Eliot stayed during Anglican conversion is for sale, March 2026
The manor house in which Eliot stayed during his conversion to Anglicanism has come up for sale.
The Manor House, Finstock was the home of William Force Stead, an American Anglo-Catholic priest and chaplain at Worcester College in nearby Oxford. He described Finstock as “a small village far away in the country, with Wychwood Forst stretching off to the north, and the lonely Cotswold hills all round.” A Tory and a High Churchman, Stead had a taste for the writings of Lancelot Andrewes, and had been introduced to Eliot in 1923 by Richard Cobden-Sanderson, publisher of the first issue of the Criterion.
In June 1927, Eliot stayed at the Manor House with the godfathers Stead had arranged. Baptised in the parish church in Finstock, Eliot stayed overnight and according to Stead, walked through Wychwood Forest at twilight “in a smart suit, a bowler hat and grey spats”. He was confirmed next morning by the Bishop of Oxford.
The house is for sale at £3.25 million; details of the property are in Cotswold Life, and Stead’s memories of the occasion are quoted in The Letters of T.S. Eliot Vol 3 p572
———————————————————————————————————-
John Haffenden to open 2026 T.S. Eliot International Summer School, March 2026
The T.S. Eliot International Summer School is “elated to announce” that Professor John Haffenden, Editor of the ongoing The Letters of T.S. Eliot, is to be their inaugural speaker this year.
Their schedule for Saturday 4th July now contains a 6.30 opening event with John Haffenden, followed by a drinks and canapes reception.
Scroll down for further information about the 2026 Summer School, of which full details are here
———————————————————————————————————-
T.S. Eliot, pluralism, and the word ‘and’, February 2026
Some aspects of The Waste Land, and Eliot’s use of the word ‘and’, 
are considered in an essay by Seamus Perry on ‘Pluralism and the Modern Poet’ in the forthcoming issue of the London Review of Books (19th Feb),
A broad consideration, ranging across several 20th century poets and philosophers, leads from William James via F.H. Bradley to T.S. Eliot and The Waste Land, “not a poem about absolute idealism; still, the curious sense of metaphysical nostalgia that haunts its broken forms must have some relation to ‘the melancholy grace, the languid mastery’ that Eliot found in Bradley. The poem feels like it inhabits, and depicts, a world that lacks the saving authority of a justification, of a something that underwrites it.”
Professor Perry goes on to consider the word ‘and’, “a hallmark pluralist word”, beginning with Eliot’s use of it during the typist episode in his allusion to Goldsmith. “The little word undoes the old rhythm of the original and scuppers the rhyme scheme too: more, it leaves the little word isolated, as though in sympathy with the solitary woman, at the end of the line, where it has no business to be, and thereby placing on it an unexpected emphasis.”
Perry quotes the observation by William H Gass that the general form of the word ‘and’ is “a simple ‘next!’” However, he writes, “For Eliot’s sad typist in The Waste Land, it’s an ominous and defeated ‘what next?’, as in Dorothy Parker’s ‘what fresh hell can this be?’”
The essay can be read in full here.
———————————————————————————————————-
Winter issue of our Society quarterly published, February 2026
The Winter issue of our Society quarterly, Exchanges…, is now available for download.
Its contributions from members include an item on reading Four Quartets on Good Friday; a review of Adrian Dunbar’s ‘multimedia’ presentation of The Waste Land; our annual consideration of the new T.S. Eliot Prizewinner; and one member’s first introduction to the works of T.S. Eliot.
You can download this new issue here.
———————————————————————————————————-
Programme released for 2026 T.S. Eliot International Summer School, February 2026
Programme details have now been published for the 2026 T.S. Eliot International Summer School.
The School will be held at Merton College, Oxford, from 4th to 12th July 2026, under the auspices of Executive Director Anthony Cuda. This year’s speakers include Jayme Stayer, Frances Dickey, John Whittier-Ferguson, Rick de Villiers, and the Eliot archivist Nancy Fulford. Subjects include Eliot and Plath, Eliot and Donne, Sweeney in St Louis and ‘La Figlia che Piange’.
The Summer School includes visits to Burnt Norton, and to the Annual T.S. Eliot Festival at Little Gidding.
Full details of the current programme, speakers, fees and scholarships can be found here.
———————————————————————————————————-
TLS and Literary Review consider Eliot’s Letters Vol 10, February 2026
Significant reviews of The Letters of T.S. Eliot Vol. 10 1942-1944 have recently been published. (The volume itself was published in July 2025.)
In the TLS, 6th February, Peter McDonald writes that “The war is far from over in this tenth volume of Eliot’s Letters, but what comes to an unforeseen end is the course of nearly all his poetry.” ‘The exasperated spirit: T. S. Eliot’s wartime correspondence’ is here. (£)
While in the December 2025 Literary 
Review, Robert Crawford writes of “the almost overwhelming daily minutiae of these splendidly edited letters.” ‘Advice to poets’ is here. (£)
———————————————————————————————————-
Colm Tóibín on T.S. Eliot, January 2026
In a full-length essay in the London Review of Books, Colm Tóibín considers ‘Yeats, Auden, Eliot: 1939, 1940, 1941’
The early part of the essay focusses upon Yeats, and his poem ‘Cuchulain Comforted’. Following Yeats’s death, attention turns to Auden’s elegy, ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’. Then, Tóibín describes the circumstances surroundingthe lecture on Yeats that Eliot gave at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. “[Eliot] noted,” writes Tóibín,“that he himself, during his short stay, dropped his customary ‘Curzon-like aloofness’ and took on what he called ‘a mask of playful blarney’, which must have been appreciated.”
Tóibín then considers ‘Little Gidding’ at length, and the ‘familiar compound ghost’ and its relationship to Yeats in particular. He compares Yeats’s ‘Ireland’ with Eliot’s ‘England’.
And he asks how, “Since Eliot’s Englishness was a kind of pose, how could he, a master of self-examination and self-doubt, be sure that his interest in prayer was not also a pose?”
He observes that “it is very hard to pray if your relationship to words themselves is as fastidious, suspicious, self-conscious and filled with doubt as Eliot’s was.”
“It is [Eliot’s] task to see if he can lure us into assenting to all the paradoxes, improbabilities and strangenesses that fill ‘Little Gidding’,” he writes. “Since the poem is concerned with the space between High Holborn and the high heavens, a great deal depends on its not being a flop.”
He concludes that “While ‘the fire and the rose’ in the last line do what they can to convince us, this England of Eliot’s lured us further into – if not philosophical belief, then at least some kind of poetic assent.
The essay is here.
———————————————————————————————————-
T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis, January 2026
In an online article, ‘C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot: A Tale of Two Critics’, Jackson Greer traces the history of the relationship between the two men, and how it turned from enmity to affection.
By 1926, Lewis had read enough of Eliot’s poetry to conclude it a great waste and devised a prank against Eliot that involved submitting mock-modernist poetry toThe Criterion. He would mock Eliot’s opening stanza from Prufrock in his own poem, “A Confession,” writing, “For twenty years I’ve stared my level best / To see if evening–any / evening–would suggest / A patient etherized upon a table; In vain. I simply wasn’t able.”
But they were brought together in 1959, summoned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, to serve on the Committee to Revise the Psalter. “It appears that while they worked on the committee to preserve much of the Coverdale translation, which they both loved deeply, the personal gulf between the men was bridged.” Lewis is subsquently quoted as remarking that “You know that I never cared for Eliot’s poetry and criticism, but when we met I loved him at once.”
The article can be read in full here.
———————————————————————————————————-
Call for conference papers on Lancelot Andrewes and T.S. Eliot, January 2026
A two-day conference at Pembroke College, 
Cambridge in September 2026 will mark the 400th anniversary of Lancelot Andrewes’ death. It also marks the 100th anniversary of the essay by T. S. Eliot which appeared first in the TLS and was later collected into the volume named after it: For Lancelot Andrewes.
“This essay instigated modern critical interest in Andrewes’ intellectual and imaginative legacy,” say the organisers, “and is a significant event not just for sermon studies but for the conjunction of modernism and early modernism, and the influence of the renaissance period on the poets and thinkers of the twentieth century and beyond.”
“This two-day conference, to be held at Pembroke College and the English Faculty in Cambridge, will invite participants to consider the current state of Andrewes criticism, and to think in new ways about the wider legacies of Eliot’s essay – and indeed his other criticism on early modern writers.”
In addition to the usual 20-minute papers, the organisers encourage some shorter, more creative responses to the subject (paraphrases, imitations, reflections). “We also envisage one panel where participants will offer brief (10-minute) responses to a particular sermon (this is likely to be Nativity 1610).”
Abstracts of papers are invited by 12th January, and full details of the conference are here.
———————————————————————————————————-
Eliot Christmas cards, signed books, letters and more for sale, January 2026
A fascinating list of items related to T.S. Eliot has been put up for sale by Blackwell’s Rare Books.
Among 35 items, the books listed and pictured include First Editions and signed copies of Eliot works including After Strange Gods and The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, and a set of the first individual Faber printings of Four Quartets. In addition, the items include several Christmas cards signed and sent by Eliot; letters from Eliot; and, unusually, Eliot-related artworks, a musical score and a vinyl recording.
The list with images can be seen as a PDF here.
———————————————————————————————————-
Murder in the Cathedral available on BBC Sounds, January 2026
The audio production of Murder in the Cathedral, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 27th December, is available to hear for a limited period on BBC Sounds.
The 1hr 27min production stars Danny Sapani, and full details and a link to listen are here.
———————————————————————————————————-
———————————————————————————————————-
News 2025 is archived – click here
News 2024 is archived – click here
News 2023 is archived – click here
News 2022 is archived – click here
News 2021 is archived – click here
News 2020 is archived – click here
News 2019 is archived – click here
News 2018 is archived – click here
News 2017 is archived – click here
News 2016 is archived – click here
News 2015 to 2012 is archived – click here