“[A] vast treasure house . . . Eliot's letters are like what he once called poetry itself: the highest form of entertainment.”—Anthony Brandt
~Anthony Brandt
“[Eliot’s] success is an improbable and amazing story, and the publication, in two volumes, of his correspondence from 1898 to 1925 . . . lets us watch that story as it was unfolding, day by day, from the inside.”—Louis Menand, New Yorker
~Louis Menand, New Yorker
“Weirdly gripping . . . one never knows when one might be stopped dead by a letter of singular importance.”—James Longenbach, The Nation
~James Longenbach, The Nation
“Better than any biography could, these letters capture the unremitting nature of Eliot's anxieties, without which he would not have written his greatest poems.”—Abigail Deutsch, Wall Street Journal
~Abigail Deutsch, Wall Street Journal
“[A] retrospective tome of introspective delight . . . Intimate revelations . . . A candid portrait of an artist as a young man.”—Publishers Weekly
~Publishers Weekly
“These letters do reveal the anxieties boiled down into The Waste Land. They also show us the graces this browbeaten life possessed.”—William Logan, New York Times Book Review
~William Logan, New York Times Book Review
“[Of] inestimable value . . . long-awaited [and] definitive.”—Jeff Simon, Buffalo News
~Jeff Simon, Buffalo News
“In these adroitly annotated volumes, the poet’s conquest of literary London is brought brilliantly to life.”—Edward Short, Weekly Standard
~Edward Short, Weekly Standard
"[A] trove of important correspondence . . . Taken together these volumes reveal the personal, economic, and social exigencies that impacted Eliot and his work and provide new, detailed literary history of Eliot and his age."—L.L. Johnson, Choice
~L.L. Johnson, Choice
“These two absorbing volumes . . . will fascinate every lover of literature, not just poetry.”—Benjamin Ivry, San Francisco Chronicle
~Benjamin Ivry, San Francisco Chronicle
“These chunky tomes of his correspondence allow us to follow day by day, drop by harrowing drop, Eliot’s ‘rudely forced’ metamorphosis into the poet of hysteria whose sufferings enabled him, like Dostoevsky, to find ‘the entrance to a genuine and personal universe.’”—Mark Ford, New York Review of Books
~New York Review of Books