1921–1925

Abstract

These are the years in which The Waste Land was published and the Criterion founded; culminating in Eliot’s joining the board of Faber and Gwyer, who issued his Poems 1909–25 on 23 November 1925, the period witnessed his decisive emergence as the dominant figure in modern English letters. During these years, too, Eliot began his moves toward Anglicanism, and toward British citizenship (he alludes to his wish to become naturalised in a postcard to Richard Aldington of 15 October 1921). His public achievements accompanied a private life increasingly unhappy, punctuated by bouts of ill-health, depression and exhaustion; 1925 was also the year in which he seems first to have mooted to friends the possibility of a separation from his wife. Pound’s absence from London was both the cause and the reflection of a change in the literary scene; socially, Eliot saw more of fellow-writers like the Woolfs and the Sitwells, although he took care to maintain a distance that left his independence uncompromised. In any case, he had no need of patronage, once the Criterion was started; by virtue of his talent and his position, he himself became the centre of a group of lesser writers associated with his magazine — such as Aldington, Flint and Herbert Read. He retained a working relationship with Wyndham Lewis, and published extracts from Lewis’s Apes of God in the Criterion,to the probable discomfort of the Bloomsbury writers and the Sitwells, whom Lewis held up to ridicule.