T. S. Eliot's career as a successful stage dramatist gathers pace throughout the fascinating letters of this volume. Following his early experimentation with the dark comedy Sweeney Agonistes (1932), Eliot is invited to write the words of an ambitious scenario sketched out by the producer-director E. Martin Browne (who was to direct all of Eliot's plays) for a grand pageant called The Rock (1934). The ensuing applause leads to a commission from the Bishop of Chichester to write a play for the Canterbury Festival, resulting in the quasi-liturgical masterpiece of dramatic writing, Murder in the Cathedral (1935). A huge commercial success, it remains in repertoire after eighty years.Even while absorbed in time-consuming theatre work, Eliot remains untiring in promoting the writers on Faber's ever broadening lists - George Barker, Marianne Moore and Louis MacNeice among them. In addition, Eliot works hard for the Christian Church he has espoused in recent years, serving on committees for the Church Union and the Church Literature Association, and creating at Faber & Faber a book list that embraces works on church history, theology and liturgy. Having separated from his wife Vivien in 1933, he is anxious to avoid running into her; but she refuses to comprehend that her husband has chosen to leave her and stalks him across literary society, leading to his place of work at the offices of Faber & Faber. The correspondence draws in detail upon Vivien's letters and diaries to provide a picture of her mental state and way of life - and to help the reader to appreciate her thoughts and feelings.

The first full-length study on T. S. Eliot and the mother, this book responds to a shortfall in understanding the true importance of Eliot’s poet-mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns, to his life and works. In doing so, it radically rethinks Eliot’s ambivalence towards women. In a context of mother–son ambivalence (simultaneous feelings of love and hate), it shows how his search for belief and love converged with a developing maternal poetics. Importantly, the chapters combine standard literary critical methods and extensive archival research with innovative feminist, maternal and psychoanalytic theorisations of mother–child relationships, such as those developed by Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jessica Benjamin, Jan Campbell and Rozsika Parker. These maternal thinkers emphasise the vital importance and benefit of recognising the pre-Oedipal mother and maternal subjectivity, contrary to traditional, repressive Oedipal models of masculinity. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters look at Eliot’s changing representations and articulations of the mother/ mother–child relationship from his very earliest writings through to the later plays. Focus is given to decisive mid-career works: Ash-Wednesday (1930), ‘Marina’ (1930), ‘Coriolan’ (1931–32) and The Family Reunion (1939), as well as to canonical works The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Notably, the study draws heavily on the wide range of Eliot materials now available, including the new editions of the complete poems, the complete prose and the volumes of letters, which are transforming our perception of the poet and challenging critical attitudes. The book also gives unprecedented attention to Charlotte Eliot’s life and writings and brings her individual female experience and subjectivity to the fore. Significantly, it establishes Charlotte’s death in 1929 as a decisive juncture, marking both Eliot’s New Life and the apotheosis of the feminine symbolised in Ash-Wednesday. Central to this proposition is Geary’s new formulation for recognising and examining a maternal poetics, which also compels a new concept of maternal allegory as a modern mode of literary epiphany. T. S. Eliot and the Mother reveals the role of the mother and the dynamics of mother–son ambivalence to be far more complicated, enduring, changeable and essential to Eliot’s personal, religious and poetic development than previously acknowledged.

Gastro-Modernism ultimately shows how global literary modernisms engage with the food culture to express anxieties about modernity as much as to celebrate the excesses modern lifestyles produce.

Despairing of his volatile, unstable wife, T. S. Eliot, at 44, resolves to put an end to the torture of his eighteen-year marriage.He breaks free from September 1932 by becoming Norton Lecturer at Harvard. His lectures will be published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933). He also delivers the Page-Barbour Lectures at Virginia (After Strange Gods, 1934). At Christmas he visits Emily Hale, to whom he is 'obviously devoted'. He gives talks all over - New York, California, Missouri, Minnesota, Chicago - and the letters describing encounters with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson and Marianne Moore ('a real Gillette blade') brim with gossip. High points include the première at Vassar College of his comic melodrama Sweeney Agonistes (1932). The year 'was the happiest I can ever remember in my life . . . successful and amusing.'Returning home, he hides out in the country while making known to Vivien his decision to leave her. But he is exasperated when she buries herself in denial: she will not accept a Deed of Separation. The close of 1933 is lifted when Eliot 'breaks into Show Business'. He is commissioned to write a 'mammoth Pageant': The Rock. This collaborative enterprise will be the proving-ground for the choric triumph of Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

This volume covers the production of Eliot's play The Family Reunion; the publication of The Idea of a Christian Society; and the joyous versifying of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. After exhausting himself through nights of fire-watching in the London wartime blackout, he travels the country, attends meetings of The Moot, delivers talks, and advises a fresh generation of writers including Cyril Connolly, Keith Douglas, Kathleen Raine and Vernon Watkins. Major correspondents include W. H. Auden, George Barker, William Empson, Geoffrey Faber, John Hayward, James Laughlin, Hope Mirrlees, Mervyn Peake, Ezra Pound, Michael Roberts, Stephen Spender, Tambimuttu, Allen Tate, Michael Tippett, Charles Williams and Virginia Woolf. Four Quartets, Eliot's culminating masterpiece, is discussed in detail.

T. S. Eliot once stated that the supreme poet "in writing himself, writes his time". In saying that, he honoured Dante and Shakespeare, but this pithy remark fittingly characterises his own work, including The Ariel Poems, with which he promptly and pointedly responded to the problems of his times. Published with unwavering regularity, a poem a year, the Ariels were composed in the period when Eliot was mainly writing prose; and, like his prose, they reverberated with diverse contemporary issues ranging from the revision of the Book of Common Prayer to the translations of Heidegger to the questions of leadership and populism. In order to highlight the poems' historical specificity, this study seeks to outline the constellations of thought connecting Eliot’s poetry and prose. In addition, it attempts to expose the Ariels’ shared arc of meaning, an unobtrusive incarnational metaphor determining the perspective from which they propose an unorthodox understanding of the epoch— an underlying pattern of thought bringing them together into a conceptually discrete set. This is the first study that both universalizes and historicises the series, striving to disclose the regular without suppressing the random. Approaching the series as a system of orderly disorder, the notion very much at home with chaos theory, it suggests new intellectual contexts, offering interpretations that are either fresh, or significantly reangled.

Volume 3 features a special forum on “Eliot and Green Modernism,” edited by Julia E. Daniel, as well as a special forum titled “First Readings of the Eliot–Hale Archive,” edited by John Whittier-Ferguson.