Coming and Going: The Women of T.S. Eliot

Abstract

There were four influential women in Eliot's life: two wives, two women who believed that one day he would marry them, and a brief affair of which he was deeply ashamed. New evidence of some 1,131 letters sent by Eliot to one of the women, Emily Hale, available to scholars after a fifty-year embargo imposed by Eliot, throws dramatic new light on T.S. Eliot the man, and also major insights into his poetry.[i] Eliot destroyed her replies, perhaps in order to protect his reputation. Eliot claimed that poetry should be transformed into an impersonal statement, but his poetry was not as 'impersonal' as he alleged, but replete with personal incidents from his private life with his women. His troubled first wife “nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive”. Emily – his first platonic, lifelong love who lived in America – was his poem’s “hyacinth girl”; Mary was a friend he frequented in England for drives in the car, domestic dinners and culture. He finally found true happiness, and the ability to write erotic verse, when he married Valerie, thirty-eight years his junior, and with whom he found contentment in his twilight years. He also had a brief affair with Nancy Cunard, of which he was deeply ashamed. The aim of this paper is to show the various major influences these four women had on Eliot’s life and work. Focus will mainly be on Prufrock, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets.