T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life

T.S. Eliot was arguably the greatest English–language poet of the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life portrays the vexed, tormented emotional life of the poet and the man, dissolving the myth of impersonal poetry that Eliot worked so hard to create. In this revision of her two–volume biography, Eliot’s Early Years and Eliot’s New Life, renowned Eliot scholar Lyndall Gordon explore the divide between Eliot as a saint and sinner, a man who conceived of a perfect life but was roiled by his own duplicity, antisemitism, and misogyny. Informed by Eliot’s letters to Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and his muse and confidante Emily Hale, An Imperfect Life follows the trials of Eliot’s life and work, uniting the two halves—one of a disillusioned sophisticate, the other of a religious poet—of what admirers have long separated into a divided career.