The love song of TS Eliot: intense letters reveal the passion behind the pen

The great poet’s newly released missives to his lost love put the lie to his aloof image – but were dismissed by the man himself as fantasy

To many who knew him, TS Eliot was considered a remote and intellectually aloof man, as perhaps befitted the author of the bleak and foreboding epic The Waste Land. His contemporary, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, went as far as to describe him as “cold-storaged humanity”.

But previously unpublished letters show that the great modernist writer was actually an intensely emotional and passionate man.