Frances Dickey

“Is not segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness?” wrote Martin Luther King, Jr., in words that resonate unexpectedly with the work of another noted twentieth-century Christian, T. S. Eliot. Eliot’s own words from Murder in the Cathedral appear in King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” where the civil rights leader drew on the poet’s cultural and religious authority to address his audience of white clergymen. Yet a connection also runs the other way: King’s remarks about segregation as an expression of “man’s tragic separation” reveal something about the sources of Eliot’s own estrangement. Like King, the poet grew up in a segregated Southern city, albeit on the opposite side of the color line. Eliot began describing urban alienation, to become his quintessential theme as a poet, in his earliest notebook poems. Along with transnational features of urban modernity such as crowded streets and industrial pollution, St. Louis also manifested a specifically American form of estrangement, that of racial segregation. From the Compromise that admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state and the Dred Scott decision that inflamed antislavery sentiment, to the Ferguson protests that led to Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country in 2014, this border state has served as a flashpoint for national racial conflict, and its history “almost caricatures race relations in the United States.” When Eliot was eight, Plessy v. Ferguson affirmed the legality of segregation, and during his childhood, Jim Crow significantly changed St. Louis, restricting the relationships of white and Black inhabitants and making the city a destination for refugees of racial violence in the South. The neighborhood of the Eliot family home was in the process of a contested transition from majority white to predominantly Black in the early years of the twentieth century. The color line was an integral part of his most formative years.

Almost as soon as they began corresponding in 1930, T. S. Eliot told Emily Hale that he treasured her letters—not just the words, but the paper itself: “I cannot bear to be separated from your letters at present, not so much for need to refer to the contents, some of which I repeat to myself often during the day and night, but for the touch of the paper and sight of the writing.”

On January 2, 2020, T. S. Eliot announced from the grave that he and Emily Hale never had sex and that marrying her would have killed the poet in him. [1] At the New York Times, the arts and culture piece on Eliot scheduled for January 9 was bumped up to breaking news. [2] Always the canny publicist, Eliot controlled the narrative of the day on which his 1, 131 letters to Hale were opened to view at the Princeton Library.