A timely essay by TS Eliot, in which he warns that “it is because I care about the future of England, that I must care also for the future of France; and it is because I must believe in the future of England, that I must look with confidence to the future of France”, is being published for the first time in English on tseliot.com, a new website launched by the poet’s estate and Faber & Faber, the publishing house where he was a director.

Featuring hundreds of unpublished letters by Eliot, along with rare material including photographs from the collection of his late wife Valerie Eliot, the site is free to access. Faber press director Henry Volans said he hoped it would show all sides of a writer whom the Nobel prize committee said in 1948 had made an “outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”.

Previously unpublished prose on the site ranges from the essay on France, which had only previously been published in French in 1944 and which was taken direct from Eliot’s typescript in the archive, to a 1951 essay on the filming of his verse play Murder in the Cathedral. Many of the letters have not been included in the volumes of Eliot’s letters in print. They include missives to and from authors edited by Eliot and correspondence with bank managers and tax inspectors. Volans said “more and more” will be added, with the eventual aim of making all of Eliot’s correspondence available.

Eliot’s poems The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land, which are still in copyright, are also being published in full on the site, along with images made available for the first time, from photographs of a relaxed Eliot by the seaside to his Nobel prize telegram, which reads: “The Swedish Academy has awarded to you this year’s Nobel prize in literature and invites you to the novel festivities on 10th December kindly answer by wire ... whether we may have the pleasure of seeing you.”

Rare material including the first and last editions of the Criterion, the journal that Eliot founded in 1922 and edited until its closure in 1939, are also made available, as is his 1952 essay from The Bookseller on publishing poetry.



“The most important difference between poetry and any other department of publishing is, that whereas with most categories of books you are aiming to make as much money as possible, with poetry you are aiming to lose as little as possible,” writes Eliot, somewhat gloomily.

He writes about the “utmost difficulty” of composing blurbs for poetry collections, because “if you praise highly, the reviewer may devote a paragraph to ridiculing the publisher’s pretensions; if you try understatement, the reviewer may remark that even the publisher doesn’t seem to think much of this book”.

“I have had both experiences,” he admits.

Eliot’s thoughts on everything from America to dancing and detective fiction are collected on the site. In 1917, he wrote that “somehow I have not felt since last March that I ever wanted to see America again. Certainly at the present time I think I should feel like an adult among children. Probably I shall get over this dread in time.” On the subject of detective fiction, he wrote: “Those who have lived before such terms as ‘high-brow fiction’, ‘thrillers’ and ‘detective fiction’ were invented realize that melodrama is perennial and that the craving for it is perennial and must be satisfied.”

The Eliot estate and Faber believe the site “sets a new standard for the public digital presence of a literary figure”.

“It’s been a long time in the planning,” said Volans. “My view is that publishers have engaged with the web a bit as a marketing platform, not taking advantage of its full potential, and this is a step closer [to that] ... It’s a companion to Eliot himself, more than to the books, and I love the idea that it will appeal to students as well as to general readers.”

In addition the site will be the gateway for writers to apply for six-week residencies at Eliot’s childhood home in New England, which the TS Eliot Foundation acquired last year and which it hopes to open as a writers’ retreat in 2017. It will also include announcements about the TS Eliot poetry prize.

“I’d like people to come for that and linger to read Prufrock,” said Volans. “This is not primarily intended to move the scholarly position on Eliot. This is a site aimed at a wider market, a wider audience, to show the remarkable breadth of what he did.”