His poems have their sources in word-music and in such acts of moral or emotional courage as well as in sheer technical mastery. However absurd or tortured on occasion, Eliot’s life and his transformation of aspects of it into verse are the work of a great poet. Coming to terms with insistent personal damage, he was able, as few have been able, to make works at once insistently new and abiding.

T. S. Eliot did not want his biography written. Much of his most intimate correspondence, including many letters to his parents and almost all of his correspondence with his first wife, was destroyed at his own request. Having managed to make lasting poetry out of his most stinging humiliations, he wished those humiliations to be afforded the grace of oblivion. Consistent with a good deal of his criticism, which stressed poetic ‘impersonality’, his efforts to suppress his own biography were sometimes devastatingly successful. Between the summer of 1905 (when Eliot was sixteen) and the winter of 1910 (when he was twenty-two) all that survives of his correspondence is a single postcard. This is one reason why the few biographers who have attempted to write his life tend to pass over the first twenty-one years in around twenty-one pages. I owe these biographers great debts, and believe biography affords not a reductive explanation that undoes the mystery of an author’s gift, but a form of artistic narrative attention that averts caricature and illuminates both poet and poetry. Nevertheless, earlier biographies of this particular poet are misleadingly proportioned. Eliot’s formative years were exactly that. Their importance is greater than most readers have realised. Young Eliot presents this crucial period in much more detail. ‘Home is where one starts from.’6

Though Eliot wanted no biography written, he did grant Valerie Eliot permission to edit his letters. After he died in 1965, she worked for decades to build a superb archive of the poet’s correspondence, drawing not just on carbon copies (many held in the archives of the London publishing house of Faber and Faber, of which Eliot was a director), but also on original letters which Mrs Eliot acquired, often through auction houses. Along with much of Eliot’s library, this reassembled archive grew to complement the massive assemblage of Eliot materials housed now in the Houghton Library at Harvard, a collection which owes its origins to the poet’s mother and brother; it complements, too, the bequest given to King’s College, Cambridge, by Eliot’s friend John Hayward. Other substantial hoards developed at locations from Leeds to Texas and from London to New York and New Zealand. Recognised as a figure of global importance, Eliot has long attracted ambitious manuscript collectors. When, not long after his death, some typescripts and other drafts of The Waste Land were revealed among the holdings of the New York Public Library, Valerie Eliot produced an impressive scholarly edition of these. In 1988 she published the first volume of her late husband’s letters; a much expanded second edition of this appeared in 2009 along with the long delayed second volume. By that time, Mrs Eliot was unwell and these books were co-edited by Professor Hugh Haughton. Now Professor John Haffenden continues to edit The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Several thousand pages are in print, with many thousands more yet to be published.

Pioneering Eliot biographers, including Peter Ackroyd (forbidden to quote more than a few words from Eliot’s work) and Lyndall Gordon (who often resorted to paraphrase), sometimes had little to go on when they conducted their research in the 1970s and early 1980s. Today, for long periods of Eliot’s life there is so much material available that almost no one will ever read through it. His collected letters and his other prose will fill many volumes, documenting some aspects of this writer’s activities (such as his editorial and publishing labours) in exhaustive, exhausting detail. However, many of these letters and articles reveal little about his personal and creative experience.