'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
Valerie Eliot, the widow of T.S. Eliot and zealous guardian of the poet's literary legacy for almost half a century, has died. She was 86.
The third volume of T.S. Eliot's letters shows the poet and critic in a period of transition. Readers of the unauthorized biographies by Lyndall Gordon and Peter Ackroyd tend to think of Eliot as either the effete Francophile of "Prufrock and Other Observations" or the austere self-professed "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion" who wrote "Ash-Wednesday."
"He obviously needed a happy marriage," she later said. "He wouldn't die until he'd had it."
"I felt I knew him as a person" from his poems, she told The Independent newspaper in 1994, "and evidently I did."
