Erotic poems written for his wife are among previously unseen works by Nobel-winning poet to feature in definitive edition, out from Faber in November

The sex life of TS Eliot has traditionally been seen through the prism of his unhappy first marriage and the dysfunctional portrayals of sexuality in his poetry, but a new edition of his work reveals the more assured side of the modernist master.

“I love a tall girl. When she sits on my knee/ She with nothing on, and I with nothing on/ I can just take her nipple in my lips/ And stroke it with my tongue,” he writes, in a poem titled How the Tall Girl and I Play Together.

The poem is one of three that were discovered in notebooks handwritten for his second wife, Valerie, who had been his secretary and was nearly 40 years his junior. To the surprise of most who knew them – and particularly to two women who had been pursuing him for years – the couple married in 1957 when he was 68 and she was 30.

Valerie, who was 5ft 8in (1.7m) tall, kept control of his estate until her death three years ago when the notebooks came to light. She hinted publicly that their sex life was just fine, after an interviewer asked why his first marriage had failed. “There was nothing wrong with Tom, if that’s your implication,” she said.

In another poem, Eliot – who took a vow of chastity in 1928 after being confirmed into the Church of England – celebrates the “miracle of sleeping together” as he “touch[es] the delicate down beneath her navel”.

The newly found poems mark a fresh edition of Eliot’s work, published by Faber in November and edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The stated intention of their release, according to Faber poetry editor Matthew Hollis, is to “stabilise the record”.

“Eliot was not only a poet and publisher but also his own curator which is quite unusual. Instead of publishing his poems collection by collection, he used his Collected Poems as a perpetually evolving home,” he said.

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Hollis said the new edition honoured the official version of Eliot’s work by opening with collected works but that it also included uncollected poems from Eliot’s youth, as well as The Waste Land typescripts, poetry for children and poems intended for personal circulation. It is this final section that will challenge the received view of Eliot, which harks back to Bertrand Russell’s description of him, just two weeks after his first marriage to Vivienne, as “exquisite and listless”.

The philosopher – who it is believed went on to have an affair with the increasingly unstable Vivienne – concluded that the couple’s three-month affair only turned into marriage to satisfy Eliot. “She says she married him in order to stimulate him, but finds she can’t do it. Obviously he married in order to be stimulated. I think she will soon be tired of him,” he wrote.



In another of the revelations of the notebooks, Eliot has restored a line to his great poem The Waste Land, which Vivienne had made him delete from the official version. “The ivory men make company between us,” it says, referring to the chess pieces that Eliot felt had become the only thing the couple had in common.

After Vivienne’s death, he disappointed an American woman called Emily Hale, with whom he had been in love as a student at Harvard and who had hoped to become the next Mrs Eliot. While he told her that he loved her, he acknowledged it was “in the way usual to men less gifted ie with complete love thro’ a married relationship.” He also turned down an English admirer, Mary Trevelyan, saying that, after Vivienne, the idea of living with someone was a “nightmare”.

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Although Eliot scholars have long been aware of the less effete personality revealed through works such as as his scatalogical epic “King Bolo and his Big Black Kween”, which was intended only for the eyes of friends such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Clive Bell, these privately circulated poems never suggested a man at ease with sexuality.

Clare Reihill, who runs the Eliot Estate, said the poet created the notebooks because he knew how long Valerie was likely to be alive without him – “47 years a widow, as it turned out”. She added that they were “a profound consolation. Valerie read them all the time”.

For lovers of a happy ending, there can be no resolution more gratifying than that shown in the poem How the Tall Girl’s Breasts Are:

“Her breasts are like ripe pears that dangle

Above my mouth

Which reaches up to take them”