September 29, 2021
Letters of T.S. Eliot
Frances Dickey
Associate Professor of English, University of Missouri;
T.S. Eliot Scholar at Princeton University
Lanny Jones, Introducer, and Frances Dickey
Minutes of the Fourth Meeting of the 80th Year
John Cotton presided at the fourth meeting of the Old Guard in 2021 on September 29, 2021. The minutes of the previous meeting were read by Julie Denny. Two guests were introduced: Zoia Korsun, by John Riganati, and John Logan, by Jan Logan.
Lanny Jones introduced the speaker, Professor Frances Dickey of the University of Missouri, who is the editor of T.S. Eliot Studies Annual and Time Present: The Newsletter of the International T.S. Eliot Society. The title of her talk was "Letters of T.S. Eliot." Professor Dickey began by referring to the great excitement that accompanied the opening on January 2, 2020, of a sealed box of 1131 letters from T.S. Eliot to Emily Hale that Hale had given the Princeton Library with the condition that they not be opened until fifty years after their deaths. Dickey was among the first to read the letters.
Introduced to Emily Hale by a cousin when he was an undergraduate at Harvard, the two acted together in plays before Eliot left for England to begin graduate school. Although for years he sent Hale flowers on her birthday, Eliot fully expressed the deep love he had felt all that time in 1930 when the correspondence began. From the very first letter in the collection, Eliot lamented that he had married the wrong woman. He wrote that he felt guilty and sorry every day of his life about the marriage, but not sorry or guilty for his love of Hale, as it gave him the best of his life. He had wed Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, the year after he went to Oxford, but it was a very unhappy marriage. This theme persists throughout the letters, emphasizing what his decision had cost in terms of happiness. Eliot explained in the correspondence that his painful decision years earlier not to ask Hale to marry him had been based upon his belief that he had nothing to offer at that point except life as the wife of an unhappy professor of philosophy at some provincial college.
Yet Eliot also came to believe that his unhappy marriage was what saved his career as a poet. He also writes that Vivienne led him to the Church of England, while other letters criticize Hale's Unitarian beliefs. Summing up these contradictory expressions and many others displayed in the letters, Dickey suggests that some say T.S. Eliot was like other emotionally tortured poets, such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath; but in the question period she noted that the poet seemed to thrive on the torment of unsatisfied love.
The letters explain, as well, enigmatic references to Hale in his major poems, including several passages in the most famous "The Waste Land" and "Ash Wednesday." She appears in one reference as the hyacinth girl dressed in white bringing the writer flowers. He once told her, as well, that he had created a part for her in a play he was writing, The Family Reunion. Such new information from the letters helps to explain sections of the poems that have long remained obscure to the reader, but also the depth of Eliot's feelings about their relationship. Dickey notes the character appears in the poems in a white gown, the color for a bride. In this form, Hale seems a muse for his poetry, as in classical literature, a Beatrice to a modern Dante.
It is clear from the correspondence, although Eliot burned her letters, that Hale had urged him to seek a divorce from Vivienne after they separated in 1932. That decade displays the most intense feelings Eliot had for Hale, including the letters containing the explanation of references to her in the poems. But Eliot refused, always citing his commitment to Anglican Church rules forbidding divorce. The letters end with Eliot's marriage a decade after Vivienne's death in 1947 to his much younger secretary, Esmé Valerie Fletcher.
Asked what surprised her the most in the letters, Dickey said it was the discovery of how conscious Eliot was of the place of autobiography in his poems, not just about Hale, but of others, as well.
Respectfully submitted,
Lloyd Gardner
Lanny Jones introduced the speaker, Professor Frances Dickey of the University of Missouri, who is the editor of T.S. Eliot Studies Annual and Time Present: The Newsletter of the International T.S. Eliot Society. The title of her talk was "Letters of T.S. Eliot." Professor Dickey began by referring to the great excitement that accompanied the opening on January 2, 2020, of a sealed box of 1131 letters from T.S. Eliot to Emily Hale that Hale had given the Princeton Library with the condition that they not be opened until fifty years after their deaths. Dickey was among the first to read the letters.
Introduced to Emily Hale by a cousin when he was an undergraduate at Harvard, the two acted together in plays before Eliot left for England to begin graduate school. Although for years he sent Hale flowers on her birthday, Eliot fully expressed the deep love he had felt all that time in 1930 when the correspondence began. From the very first letter in the collection, Eliot lamented that he had married the wrong woman. He wrote that he felt guilty and sorry every day of his life about the marriage, but not sorry or guilty for his love of Hale, as it gave him the best of his life. He had wed Vivienne Haigh-Wood in 1915, the year after he went to Oxford, but it was a very unhappy marriage. This theme persists throughout the letters, emphasizing what his decision had cost in terms of happiness. Eliot explained in the correspondence that his painful decision years earlier not to ask Hale to marry him had been based upon his belief that he had nothing to offer at that point except life as the wife of an unhappy professor of philosophy at some provincial college.
Yet Eliot also came to believe that his unhappy marriage was what saved his career as a poet. He also writes that Vivienne led him to the Church of England, while other letters criticize Hale's Unitarian beliefs. Summing up these contradictory expressions and many others displayed in the letters, Dickey suggests that some say T.S. Eliot was like other emotionally tortured poets, such as Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath; but in the question period she noted that the poet seemed to thrive on the torment of unsatisfied love.
The letters explain, as well, enigmatic references to Hale in his major poems, including several passages in the most famous "The Waste Land" and "Ash Wednesday." She appears in one reference as the hyacinth girl dressed in white bringing the writer flowers. He once told her, as well, that he had created a part for her in a play he was writing, The Family Reunion. Such new information from the letters helps to explain sections of the poems that have long remained obscure to the reader, but also the depth of Eliot's feelings about their relationship. Dickey notes the character appears in the poems in a white gown, the color for a bride. In this form, Hale seems a muse for his poetry, as in classical literature, a Beatrice to a modern Dante.
It is clear from the correspondence, although Eliot burned her letters, that Hale had urged him to seek a divorce from Vivienne after they separated in 1932. That decade displays the most intense feelings Eliot had for Hale, including the letters containing the explanation of references to her in the poems. But Eliot refused, always citing his commitment to Anglican Church rules forbidding divorce. The letters end with Eliot's marriage a decade after Vivienne's death in 1947 to his much younger secretary, Esmé Valerie Fletcher.
Asked what surprised her the most in the letters, Dickey said it was the discovery of how conscious Eliot was of the place of autobiography in his poems, not just about Hale, but of others, as well.
Respectfully submitted,
Lloyd Gardner