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 a reaction against Eliot has begun.
Though his poetic reputation appears unassailable as yet, two primary themes have arisen to criticize Eliot the man. The first is the allegation that he neglected, abandoned, or was otherwise cruel to his first wife, Vivienne. This allegation was played over in Carole Seymour-Jones’s Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot (2001) and more publicly in Michael Hastings’s 1984 play and film, Tom and Viv. The pertinent facts, though disputable, are now mostly available.
But it is the second matter, one where the man and the poet cannot be so easily separated, which is far more problematic: in several early poems and lectures there are passages which suggest Eliot was an anti-Semite. This fact has been
