T.S. Eliot: the art of self-promotion

T.S. Eliot

Joseph Epstein has an interesting essay on T.S. Eliot in Commentary, in which he notes that, "The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day."

Far from its being accidental, Eliot’s fame was planned for, carefully cultivated, and nurtured once it arrived. From the first volume of Eliot’s letters, newly revised and just released in Great Britain, we learn that, in 1919, when he was 31, he wrote to J.H. Woods, his philosophy teacher at Harvard: “There are only two ways in which a writer can become important—to write a great deal, and have his writings appear everywhere, or to write very little.”

He chose the latter: to write very little but always to dazzle. “My reputation in London is built upon a small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year,” he wrote. “The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event.” 

Eliot worked at Lloyd’s Bank between 1917 and 1925 as the head of a small department stationed in the basement. He felt that, as he put it, he could “influence London opinion and English literature in a better way” by remaining slightly outside of things. The bank, moreover, with its distance from the standard literary life, lent him, as he noted, “aura.”

He wrote to his mother in 1919: “I really think that I have far more influence on English letters than any other American has ever had unless it be Henry James. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me, and [working in the bank] I can also remain isolated and detached.”

Those are the words of a man carefully but decidedly on the make.