PBS NewsHour Explains the Value of Hale/Eliot Letter Trove

Joshua Barajas of PBS NewsHour guides readers through the process undertaken by the Houghton Library (Harvard University) and the Princeton University Library to unseal letters written by T.S. Eliot to his "muse," Emily Hale, followed by Eliot's letter-from-the-grave to contemporary readers of their correspondence. "Decades ago," Barajas begins, "biographer Lyndall Gordon made a vow: She would live to see the day a certain trove of T.S. Eliot’s correspondence was unveiled." More: 

Last week, the modernist poet’s letters to lifelong friend Emily Hale were opened to researchers. Eliot is regarded as one of the key American poets of the 20th century, whose work often flouted the conventions that governed traditional poetry at the time. Hale, meanwhile, is described as his “secret muse.”

It will take months or years for experts to fully digest the new cache of information, every Eliot scholar who spoke with the PBS NewsHour stressed. But certain revelations popped off the page, like a clipped stanza from one of Eliot’s poems.

In 1912, Eliot met Hale in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Years later, he began writing to her during his first (unhappy) marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, launching a rich epistolary relationship that would last more than 25 years. Later in life, Hale, a Boston-born speech and drama teacher, donated the letters she had received to Princeton University Library, but had instructed that the contents not be revealed until 50 years after they died, counting from the death of whoever lived longer. (Hale died in 1969, four years after Eliot.)

For years, scholars hoped the letters would offer a better understanding of the poet’s inner life, hidden beneath his austere reserve. Eliot was a public figure who nevertheless did not want his life to be public knowledge.

Gordon, a South African-born author, first heard about the letters nearly 50 years ago, when she was writing a dissertation on Eliot’s early years; since then, she has written several books about him. Last Thursday, Gordon finally got her first look at some of this private correspondence.

Continue reading at PBS NewsHour.