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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Dalya Alberge

The love song of TS Eliot: intense letters reveal the passion behind the pen

Photographic portrait of Emily Hale
Emily Hale in 1914 at the time TS Eliot knew her while studying at Harvard. Photograph: Mary Patten/Smith College Archives

To many who knew him, TS Eliot was considered a remote and intellectually aloof man, as perhaps befitted the author of the bleak and foreboding epic The Waste Land. His contemporary, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, went as far as to describe him as “cold-storaged humanity”.

But previously unpublished letters show that the great modernist writer was actually an intensely emotional and passionate man.

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