Jewel Spears Brooker

T. S. Eliot entered the last decade of his monumental career with no lack of energy in pursuing his dramatic and critical writing, completing his final play, The Elder Statesman, and publishing a versatile sequence of canonical essays, including "Goethe as the Sage," "The Politics of Literature," "The Frontiers of Criticism," and "To Criticize the Critic." All the while he was fully engaged in a variety of critical genres, including tributes to international writers and artists in celebration of their careers, such as Picasso, Sylvia Beach, and Paul Claudel; he wrote twelve obituaries for close friends in his literary and publishing life, from Harriet Weaver and Geoffrey Faber to Wyndham Lewis and Louis MacNeice. As a public figure in high demand, he maintained a rigorous schedule of lectures and addresses for English, European, and American audiences; he wrote numerous public letters to editors of papers and journals on literary, church, and civic matters, from cuts to the BBC's Third Programme to the language of the New English Bible. Much critical energy was invested in writing introductions and prefaces to editions and books on French symbolism, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, Paul Valéry, David Jones, John Davidson, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. After reading, criticizing, and meditating on the writing of an English poet over the whole of his career, Eliot made him the subject of his final major essay, George Herbert: "In his poems we can find ample evidence of his spiritual struggles, of self-examination and self-criticism, and of the cost at which he acquired godliness."