Volume 4 of the letters of T. S. Eliot, which brings the poet,
critic, editor and publisher into his forties, documents a period of
anxious and fast-moving professional recovery and personal and
spiritual consolidation.
Following the withdrawal of financial support by his patron Lady
Rothermere, Faber & Gwyer (subsequently Faber & Faber)
eventually takes over the responsibility for Eliot's literary
periodical The Criterion. He supplements his income as a fledgling
publisher, 'just as I did ten years ago, by reviewing, articles,
prefaces, lectures, broadcasting talks, and anything that turns up.'
His work as editor is internationalist above all else, and Eliot
makes contact with a number of eminent and emergent writers and
thinkers, as well as forging links with European reviews ('all of
which have endeavoured to keep the intellectual blood of Europe
circulating throughout the whole of Europe').
Eliot's responsibilities during this period extend to caring for
Vivien, who returns home after months in a French psychiatric
hospital and whom he looks after with anxious fortitude; and the
personal correspondence with his mother closes with her death in
September 1929.
John Haffenden is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at
the University of Sheffield, Senior Research Fellow of the Institute
of English Studies, University of London, and a Fellow of the British
Academy. His publications include a biography of the American poet
John Berryman; editions of the works of William Empson including
the Complete Poems (2000); and an award-winning two-volume
biography of Empson (2005, 2006). He was General Editor of Letters
of T. S. Eliot, volumes 1 and 2 (2009).