The Secret History of T. S. Eliot’s Muse

For years, Emily Hale was the object of his longing and the source of his inspiration. Was the loss of their romance a boon for his poetry? by Michelle Taylor, at The New Yorker.

"There is no way to say whether marrying Hale would have destroyed Eliot’s art. What reading his letters makes clear, however, is that the deferral of his desire—the ascetic refusal to make his most enduring love ever truly complete—was what sustained it."

See works by Eliot in Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) Vol. 5, and Great Books of the Western World (second edition, Vol. 60, 1990).