1 May 2023
Peter Lowe, Bader College
Jayme Stayer, Becoming T. S. Eliot: The Rhetoric of Voice and Audience in ‘Inventions of the March Hare’. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021)
‘The more we know of Eliot, the better,’ wrote Ezra Pound on the 1971 publication of the manuscript and associated drafts of The Waste Land, and in recent years Eliot’s readers have certainly seen a great deal more material become available. The published edition of his letters has now reached 1941 while the eight-volume Complete Prose offers an immense archive of previously unavailable material to sit alongside both halves of Robert Crawford’s biography. And, of course, there are the letters to Emily Hale, laying bare as they do the complex relationship revived in the 1930s when Eliot found himself once again close to the woman who embodied the American milieu from which he had found himself, by accident or design, separated by what Jayme Stayer calls “his hasty marriage and permanent expatriation.” Continue reading “Book Review: Becoming T. S. Eliot: The Rhetoric of Voice and Audience in Inventions of the March Hare”