T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life - Softcover

Gordon, Lyndall

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393320936 ISBN 13: 9780393320930

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999

Synopsis

Lyndall Gordon's biographical work on T. S. Eliot has won many dramatic accolades.

In this "nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection" (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's "complex spiritual and artistic history . . . with tact, diligence, and subtlety" (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full the issue of Eliot's anti-Semitism as well as the less-noted issue of his misogyny. Her account "rescues both the poet and the man from the simplifying abstractions that have always been applied to him" (The New York Times), and is "definitive but not dogmatic, sympathetic without taking sides. . . . Its voice rings with authority" (Baltimore Sun). Praised by Cynthia Ozick as "daring, strong, psychologically brilliant," Gordon's study remains true to the mysteries of art as she chronicles the poet's "insistent search for salvation."

About this title

About the Author

Lyndall Gordon is the prize-winning author of T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life and Lives Like Loaded Guns. She is a Fellow at the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN. She lives in Oxford.

From Kirkus Reviews

Veteran biographer Gordon ballasts Eliot's listing reputation with a weighty volume that combineswith heavy revisions and some new additionsher well-received partial biographies Eliot's Early Years (1977) and Eliot's New Life (1988). Eliot's decision to frustrate biographers hampered Gordon's first two books (as well as Peter Ackroyd's incisive complete life in 1984). Since then, Eliot's early correspondence and the apprentice poems Inventions of the March Hare have been published, and Gordon has assiduously tracked down correspondence and manuscripts that the Eliot estate has not put under embargo. Her thesis, first stated in Eliot's Early Years, that his poetic output, from the Modernist despair of The Waste Land to the sacred quests of Four Quartets, should be interpreted as an essentially coherent spiritual biography is reinforced in this newest volume. Delving into Eliot's reading, from Jules Laforgue's submerged religious obsessiveness to Lancelot Andrewes's sermons, Gordon puts Eliot's religious conversion to an idiosyncratically Puritanical Anglo-Catholicism in the context of his family's Bostonian Unitarian tradition and New England Calvinism, although she also believes his search for saintliness was a failure. For what she calls a ``public hermit,'' the difficulty of mapping an inner life is further complicated by Eliot's loathing of self-revelation, in both his private and public existence. Gordon also deals with his flaws: anti-Semitism, misogyny, and a penchant for scatological verse are among the most glaring. As Gordon laid out in her second volume, one of Eliot's worst personal failures was his inability to commit to a shared life with Emily Hale, whom he had known since 1913. Despite Gordon's painstaking reconstruction of this crucial relationship here, much remains unsaid: Eliot had Hale's letters to him destroyed, and his to her are sealed until 2019. Whatever Eliot's biographic blanks, An Imperfect Life intelligently charts his lifelong ``escape from personality.'' (b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0393320936
• ISBN 13: 9780393320930
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 754