T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life

T. S. Eliot was arguably the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century. In poems such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets, he spoke directly to his times, and his essays influenced a whole school of literary criticism. Today, as long-awaited personal papers and letters emerge, there is a new impetus to reexamine and understand Eliot-both as a poet and person. T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life portrays the vexed, tormented emotional life of the poet and the man, dissolving the myth of impersonal poetry that Eliot worked so hard to create. In this latest revision of her two-volume biography, Eliot’s Early Years and Eliot’s New Life, renowned Eliot scholar Lyndall Gordon explores the divide between Eliot as a saint and sinner, a man who conceived of a perfect life but, roiled by his own duplicity, antisemitism, and misogyny, had the honesty to admit that he could not meet it. Making use of Eliot’s letters to Virginia Woolf,