After strange gods

Valerie Eliot & Hugh Haughton, editors --> reviewed by Douglas Murray -->

In his elegy on the death of Yeats, Auden wrote: “Time that with this strange excuse/ Pardoned Kipling and his views,/ And will pardon Paul Claudel,/ Pardons him for writing well.” Had he written the poem a little later, Auden may have had to include the only twentieth-century poet arguably greater than himself. To date, no official biography of T. S. Eliot has been permitted. Eliot remarried late to a woman almost four decades his junior. Valerie Eliot is still alive, and has protectively enforced her late husband’s wish that there be no official “life.” A number of notable unauthorized biographies, however, have got around the ban, and along with a few other works, suggest that...