Volume 21, Number 14 · September 19, 1974

In Eliot's Cave

By Stephen Spender
Golden Codgers
by Richard Ellmann

Oxford University Press, 193 pp., $7.95

Eliot in His Time
edited by A. Walton Litz

Princeton University Press, 208 pp., $8.50

Eliot in Perspective
edited by Graham Martin

Humanities Press, 306 pp., $12.00

The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
by William M. Chace

Stanford University Press, 238 pp., $8.95

Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T.S. Eliot
by T.S. Matthews

Harper & Row, 224 pp., $8.95

In his essay 'Literary Biography' in Golden Codgers, Richard Ellmann points out that even in the most candid biographical writings, like Michael Holroyd's account of Lytton Strachey and his love life with Carrington, something is kept back, 'the precise anatomical convolutions remain shrouded by the last rags of biographical decorum.' And commenting on Ernest Jones's stopping short at certain points in his biography of Freud on the grounds that material has been touched on which is better left to the psychoanalysts, he observes that 'one has the sense of descending into a cave only to be told that the real cave is further down, and unfortunately closed to the public.'



Review, 5416 words

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