Frances Dickey

“Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr., in words that resonate unexpectedly with the work of another noted twentieth-century Christian, T. S. Eliot. [1] Eliot’s own words from Murder in the Cathedral appear in King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” where the civil rights leader drew on the poet’s cultural and religious authority to address his audience of white clergymen. [2] Yet...

Almost as soon as they began corresponding in 1930, T. S. Eliot told Emily Hale that he treasured her letters—not just the words, but the paper itself: “I cannot bear to be separated from your letters at present, not so much for need to refer to the contents, some of which I repeat to myself often during the day and night, but for the touch of the paper and sight of the writing.”

On January 2, 2020, T. S. Eliot announced from the grave that he and Emily Hale never had sex and that marrying her would have killed the poet in him. [1] At the New York Times, the arts and culture piece on Eliot scheduled for January 9 was bumped up to breaking news. [2] Always the canny publicist, Eliot controlled the narrative of the day on which his 1, 131 letters to Hale were opened to view at the Princeton Library.