Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast

Sex Lives of Poets: Eliot

January 15, 2024 Aaron Smith and James Allen Hall Episode 126
Breaking Form: a Poetry and Culture Podcast
Sex Lives of Poets: Eliot
Show Notes

It's the love song of J. Alfred Prufcock--er, Prufrock this week as the queens discuss the sex life of T.S. Eliot.

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Valerie Eliot died in 2012 at age 86. Her net worth was about 17.5 million dollars. She first memorized Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" at 14, and from the age of 18 she tried to get into his orbit, even going to the same church and then becoming his secretary at Faber & Faber. You can read her obit here. 

You can read Eliot's letters to Emily Hale for free here.

The tea about Eliot's letters are here and here.

Read Louis Menad's "The Women Come and Go" in The New Yorker, which forms the basis of many of the facts we detail in the episode.

Another New Yorker article by William H. Pritchard that focuses particularly on the relationship between Haigh-Wood and Eliot is "The Hollow Man and His Wife."

This Guardian article discusses Vivienne's diaries.