Volume 31, Number 20 · December 20, 1984
The Ideal Husband
By Rosemary Dinnage
T.S. Eliot: A Life
by Peter Ackroyd
Simon and Schuster, 400 pp., $24.95
The private life of a dead poet, T.S. Eliot wrote in 1956, is not sacred ground; indeed, 'any critic seriously concerned with a man's work should be expected to know something about the man's life.' 'Nor is there any reason why biographies of poets should not be written. Furthermore, the biographer of an author should possess some critical ability; he should be a man of taste and judgment, appreciative of the work of the man whose biography he undertakes.' In this biography Peter Ackroyd admirably fulfills that criterion; time and again, with the lightest possible touch, he illuminates Eliot's poetry and criticism more acutely than many a ponderous academic volume. Though he is debarred from the correspondence, he makes absorbing reading out of Eliot's rather quiet life; and at the same time provides brief asides on the work that are themselves a skeleton framework for assessing the entire corpus (an excellent title for a detective story, Eliot once said).
Review, 3238 words
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