T. S. Eliot: A Short Biography

John Worthen

Dec 2021 · Haus Publishing

About this ebook

Biographical writing about Eliot is in a more confused and contested state than is the case with any other major twentieth-century writer. No major biography has been released since the publication of his early poems, Inventions of the March Hare, in 1996, which radically altered the reading public's perception of Eliot. There have been attempts to turn the American woman Emily Hale into the beloved woman of Eliot's middle years; and Eliot has also been blamed for the instability of his first wife and declared a closet homosexual. This biography frees Eliot from such distortions, as well as from his cold and unemotional image. It offers a sympathetic study of his first marriage which does not attempt to blame, but to understand; it shows how Eliot's poetry can be read for its revelations about his inner world. Eliot once wrote that every poem was an epitaph, meaning that it was the inscription on the tombstone of the experience which it commemorated. His poetry shows, however, that the deepest experiences of his life would not lie down and die, and that he felt condemned to write about them.John Worthen is the acclaimed author of D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider.

About the author

John Worthen was born in London in 1943 and as an academic specialised for many years in writing about the life, and editing the work, of D. H. Lawrence, later becoming Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of The Gang: Coleridge, the Wordsworth and the Hutchinsons (Yale University Press).