Books, Arts & Manners: The Quality of Bleakness

T. S. Eliot: A Life, by Peter Ackroyd (Simon & Schuster, 400 pp., $24.95)

Eliot—like Kafka, Orwell, and Auden—specified that he did not want to have a biography written about him. But he paradoxically stated, in “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956): “There is no reason why biographies of poets should not be written. . . . Any critic seriously concerned with a man’s work should be expected to know something about the man’s life.” Several inadequate biographical studies have been published, and an edition of Eliot’s letters has been promised for many years (I have heard, on good authority, that this project has long since been completed and is being deliberately withheld), so this study fills a major gap.

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

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T. S. Eliot: A Life, by Peter Ackroyd (Simon & Schuster, 400 pp., $24.95)

Eliot—like Kafka, Orwell, and Auden—specified that he did not want to have a biography written about him. But he paradoxically stated, in “The Frontiers of Criticism” (1956): “There is no reason why biographies of poets should not be written. . . . Any critic seriously concerned with a man’s work should be expected to know something about the man’s life.” Several inadequate biographical studies have been published, and an edition of Eliot’s letters has been promised for many years (I have heard, on good authority, that this project has long since been completed and is being deliberately withheld), so this study fills a major gap.