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I would perhaps not infer too much about Tom Eliot's feelings towards his day job from a few letters to a worried mother an ocean away and a polite resignation
by cobralibre 15y ago
I would perhaps not infer too much about Tom Eliot's feelings towards his day job from a few letters to a worried mother an ocean away and a polite resignation letter. Even Eliot's letter to Ezra Pound, which expresses quite a different view of his work at the bank ("Of course I want to leave the Bank..."), must be read with some suspicion because of Pound's, shall we say, strong opinions about banking and finance.
I would be surprised, actually, if no dissertations have in fact been written on this topic. The Pound connection alone makes that unlikely.
- gruseom 15y agoAny dissertations presumably would lack this material, because Eliot's letters are only just being published. That's what's behind the OP and a good many recent posts about the renascent Eliot. It's astonishing that Eliot's letters are only being published now (and then only a small, early fraction of them). The reason appears to be that his second wife, who was much younger than he, is still alive and exercising tight control of his legacy. Pound's mentorship of Eliot is well known, of course. What Pound doesn't mention in the letter where he praises The Waste Land as the poem of the century is that he himself had edited it practically to the point of co-authorship.