Epistolary Gems

The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 5: 1930–1931 edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden. London: Faber & Faber, 2014; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015. Hardcover, 878 pages, $45/$85. “If I could destroy every letter I have ever written in my life I would do...

Virtue, Family, and Community

The Republic of Virtue by Paul Lake. University of Evansville Press, 2013. Hardcover, 80 pages, $15. The title poem of Paul Lake’s The Republic of Virtue begins like Genesis. “In Year One,” he writes, “the month of Vintage, time began.” Instead of the Spirit of God...

Time and Permanence in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets

Pedro Blas González In my beginning is my end…. … to be restored, our sickness must grow worse. —T. S. Eliot, Four QuartetsT. S. Eliot begins Burnt Norton with a reflection of time as cyclical. Because time-past and present are enveloped by time-future, Eliot...

An Integrated Vision

Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot’s Physics and Poetics, by Benjamin G. Lockerd, Jr. Bucknell University Press, 1999. 320pp., $48.50 cloth. The title of this book, intriguing though it is, may seem forbidding and suggestive of recondite subject matter. Certainly, it is a...