T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life - Hardcover

by Lyndall Gordon (Author)

T. S. Eliot was arguably the greatest English-language poet of the twentieth century. In poems such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets, he spoke directly to his times, and his essays influenced a whole school of literary criticism. Today, as long-awaited personal papers and letters emerge, there is a new impetus to reexamine and understand Eliot--both as a poet and person.

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 latest revision of her two-volume biography, Eliot's Early Years and Eliot's New Life, renowned Eliot scholar Lyndall Gordon explores the divide between Eliot as a saint and sinner, a man who conceived of a perfect life but, roiled by his own duplicity, antisemitism, and misogyny, had the honesty to admit that he could not meet it. Making use of Eliot's letters to Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and his muse and confidante, Emily Hale, Gordon follows the trials of Eliot's life and work, including vital new findings about the influence of the women who knew him and the emotional sources of his poems.

An Imperfect Life unites the two halves--one of a disillusioned sophisticate, the other of a religious poet; one of a carefully composed British citizen, the other of an American expatriate influenced by his Puritan forebears--of what admirers have long separated into a divided career. The result is the definitive story of an immortal poet, from one of today's greatest literary biographers.

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Praise for the Work of Lyndall Gordon

The Hyacinth Girl (2022)

"Vibrant. . . . In narrating [Eliot's] romantic attachments, [Lyndall Gordon] captures his manipulations, his selfishness, what she calls his 'cruelty, ' without abandoning her mission to understand him and his writing. . . . There is a human richness to Eliot's cerebral poetry that we can appreciate more in the context of his knotted emotional life, and Gordon's art is in drawing this out."
-- Katie Roiphe, ?New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

"The most brilliant and incisive new book on Eliot."
-- Colm T?ib?n, Irish Times (Best Books of the Year)

T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (1999 Edition)

"An intellectually demanding, sophisticated and distinguished book. . . . Probing and extremely thoughtful."
-- Richard Bernstein, New York Times

Eliot's New Life (1988)

"Writing with judicious sympathy and an intimate knowledge of his poetry and plays, Ms. Gordon artfully moves back and forth between the life and the work, creating a subtle portrait of Eliot as a Jamesian hero torn between memory and desire, worldly happiness and a more rarefied world of the spirit."
-- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"Daring, strong, and psychologically brilliant."
-- Cynthia Ozick, The New Yorker

Eliot's Early Years (1977)

"The best written account we have of Eliot's early life and works, and offers an interpretation that commands attention and respect."
-- Richard Ellmann