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, Ezra Pound, and his muse and confidante, Emily Hale, Gordon follows the trials of Eliot’s life and work, including vital new findings about the influence of the women who knew him and the emotional sources of his poems.

An Imperfect Life unites the two halves—one of a disillusioned sophisticate, the other of a religious poet; one of a carefully composed British citizen, the other of an American expatriate influenced by his Puritan forebears—of what admirers have long separated into a divided career. The result is the definitive story of an immortal poet, from one of today’s greatest literary biographers.