In 1927, T. S. Eliot was secretly baptized into the Church of England and shortly afterward took British citizenship, formally completing a transformation that had been building for years. The young poet who had once startled readers with the fractured, disillusioned voice of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was, by his late thirties, becoming something closer to a defender of tradition, religious order, and inherited authority. Few writers have undergone so complete a reinvention in plain sight—one that would shape the second half of a career as consequential as any in twentieth-century poetry.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Harvard, Eliot emigrated to England at twenty-six and never permanently left, spending the rest of his life shaped equally by his American origins and his adopted country. Trapped for years in an unhappy marriage and writing in the disoriented aftermath of the First World War, he produced The Waste Land, one of the defining poems of literary modernism, still startling in its fragmentation nearly a century later. The critic Edmund Wilson once called him one of the era's only truly authentic poets, even as Eliot’s later, more explicitly religious work, culminating in Four Quartets, seemed to belong to an entirely different writer than the one who had shocked London’s literary establishment years before.
That contradiction is part of what makes Eliot so difficult to pin down. He is treated as an authority on modern art, philosophy, and religion, yet his own words have been claimed by wildly conflicting camps. He is read as a radical experimenter by some, a conservative reactionary by others, and a spiritual seeker by still others, often within the very same body of work.
Joseph Maddrey has spent much of his career trying to reconcile those competing versions of Eliot. In The Making of T.S. Eliot: A Study of the Literary Influences, he traces the poet's intellectual and spiritual development in stages, attempting, as he's put it, to see the world as Eliot himself saw it. In Simply Eliot, drawing on previously unavailable material, including thousands of personal letters, he offers a more intimate portrait of the man behind the poems. Notably, Maddrey’s own background is far from conventional literary academia—he built his early career writing and producing documentaries on true crime and horror film. In the conversation that follows, we trace Eliot’s transformation from disillusioned modernist to religious traditionalist and ask what unites the many faces of one of the century's most quoted and least understood poets.
Charles Carlini: In 1927, Eliot was secretly baptized into the Church of England and soon after became a British citizen. What do you think that conversion actually meant to him: a genuine spiritual turning point, or something more complicated?
Joseph Maddrey: “Conversion” is a tricky word because it can imply so many different types of personal experience. Eliot’s embrace of the Anglican Church was a genuine spiritual turning point, but it wasn’t as abrupt as it probably seemed to friends and colleagues who made their own assumptions about the poet’s inner life. Some saw Eliot’s baptism as an intellectual surrender meant to remove doubt or end his spiritual pursuit, but that wasn’t the poet’s experience. In Eliot’s mind, joining the Church of England was a natural culmination as well as the beginning of a new—and, in some ways, equally difficult—journey. I think it’s important for us to try to understand that turning point the way he did, within the context of his entire life and work, rather than as a singular moment.
CC: Your book The Making of T. S. Eliot aims to trace his development by trying to see the world as Eliot himself saw it, stage by stage. What did that approach reveal that a more conventional biography might have missed?
JM: I love literary or critical biographies that probe the connections between an artist’s personal life and their work. To me, this is the main area a biography should explore, because art doesn’t come out of a void; it comes out of personal needs and experiences (which are, sometimes, also universal needs and experiences). I think we can gain more from a work of art by understanding its origins, by understanding the artist’s inner life, the life of the unconscious mind. That’s a way of expanding our own inner lives, our own sense of meaning and purpose.
CC: You describe Eliot's arc as moving from an “early Romantic revolutionary” to “a staunch defender of tradition.” That's a striking reversal. How does a poet end up on the opposite side of where he started?
JM: Eliot probably wouldn’t have said that he ended up on the opposite side; he would have taken a more holistic view of his personal evolution. The poet never repudiated his early work or views; he said that would be like a person trying to deny their own childhood. But people grow and change, and so do their beliefs and values. That’s why biography is so important to me. I’d argue that the seeds of Eliot’s later work are apparent in his early work, and that he was experimenting with different ideas and philosophies that became a part of who he was. I think it’s important to add that T. S. Eliot vocalized some pretty rigid beliefs in mid-life, but he mellowed later. If we focus on only one moment or time period in the artist’s life, we lose sight of the whole person.
CC: Eliot’s marriage to Vivienne is often described as deeply unhappy, and it coincided with the years leading up to The Waste Land. How much of that poem’s devastation do you think came directly out of his own life?
JM: One of Eliot’s major contributions to literary criticism is the term “objective correlative,” which he defined as a set of objects or situations that embody a particular emotion. Eliot, an intellectual, used his literary knowledge to express an emotional crisis stemming partly from his ill-considered marriage to Vivienne. I believe The Waste Land is essentially a Jungian poem, in the sense that the poet was engaged in a form of self-therapy. He also recognized that his personal crisis was connected to a contemporary crisis in Western culture, as well as to more universal patterns of human turmoil and growth. It is an extremely intimate and timeless poem, which is why it continues to be read and studied.
CC: Eliot absorbed an unusually wide range of influences—Jules Laforgue, Baudelaire, Dante, the Metaphysical poets, and the philosopher F. H. Bradley, whose work was the subject of his doctoral dissertation. Which of these do you think shaped him most, and why?
JM: Eliot acknowledged that different types of influences emerge over the course of a person’s life. He noted that early in life, artists tend to imitate, and that this imitation is vital to developing a distinct voice. Initially, the French Symbolist poets, especially Jules Laforgue, showed Eliot how to transform his own sordid experiences into poetry. Later, Henri Bergson and F. H. Bradley provided philosophical foundations for the worldview behind his poetry. The influence of the Metaphysical poets came a little later and helped Eliot solidify a personal philosophy of poetry. Without any of these influences (and countless others), we wouldn’t have the T. S. Eliot we know. That said, if I had to choose one influence that stands above all others, it would be Dante. I think Dante served as a spiritual guide for Eliot in the same way that Virgil guided Dante.
CC: For Simply Eliot, you drew on thousands of previously unavailable personal letters. What did that correspondence reveal about Eliot that his poetry alone never could have?
JM: T. S. Eliot guarded his private life very closely, and for a long time his estate guarded his letters just as closely, creating an information void. In the late 20th century, many critics and writers attempted to fill that void by producing theories and innuendos that colored the poet’s legacy. In the 21st century, the publication of these letters—as well as Eliot’s complete Collected Prose—has allowed a new generation of readers and scholars to see the poet as a human being rather than an ideologue or an enigma. It’s easier to know and appreciate a person—someone with complicated emotional relationships with his father, mother, brother, and wife. One of the goals of Simply Eliot was to humanize the poet and make him more accessible, without losing sight of the work itself—which is the truest biography.
CC: Edmund Wilson called Eliot one of the only truly “authentic” poets of his era. What do you think Wilson meant by that, and do you agree?
JM: Wilson made that statement in 1922, in a newspaper review of The Waste Land. He was praising the musicality of Eliot’s verse, the way the music conveys a meaning that goes beyond intellectual articulation. In a 1942 lecture, Eliot said that was his goal as a poet—and something he strived for especially in Four Quartets. “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” I agree, because that's the experience I had when I first read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in high school. I was completely captivated by the rhymes and rhythms of the poem, which made me feel uneasy and also, in some way, understood. Once I asked myself why the poem made me feel that way, I was on a lifelong journey with Eliot.
CC: Your own background is in documentary filmmaking, true crime, and horror—a long way from modernist poetry scholarship. What drew you to Eliot specifically, and has that outsider's path changed how you approach him compared to a traditional academic?
JM: I had a high school teacher who noticed that I was reading a lot of Stephen King, and she said I should broaden my literary horizons. She recommended T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Dostoevsky, Somerset Maugham, and a bunch of other writers and philosophers whose work really spoke to me. I responded to the work as an enthusiastic and inquisitive reader, not as an aspiring critic or scholar—and I think that’s what the best critics and scholars do too. I have to give some credit to author Lyndall Gordon, whose books on Eliot made me fall in love with the concept of spiritual biography. In fact, all of the biographies I’ve written have been indebted to that basic concept, leading up to my 2024 book The Soul of Wes Craven, which combines my love of classical literature, philosophy, and poetry with an equally strong love of cinema and horror stories. My goal was to treat Wes with the same seriousness that an academic would treat Eliot.
CC: Four Quartets is often treated as Eliot’s spiritual culmination, written decades after The Waste Land's despair. How do you read the relationship between these two poems—as a repudiation of his earlier self, or a continuation of it?
JM: Later in life, Eliot said his early work was an honest expression of who he was at the time, but he admitted that he could no longer relate well to the mind that created The Waste Land. People change. Hopefully, we evolve. What I tried to do with Simply Eliot was to track that evolution. I think it’s fair to characterize Four Quartets as a spiritual culmination (Eliot called it his ultimate poetic statement)—but it is worth pointing out that Four Quartets was not his final statement, and it’s not the end of Simply Eliot.
CC: Eliot’s words are cited today by wildly different, even contradictory, camps—as an authority on faith, tradition, and modern art. What do you think he would make of how selectively he is now quoted, and what do you wish more readers understood about him?
JM: There are a few Eliot quotes that I find myself returning to again and again. Lately, the main one is from his play The Rock: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” When I first read The Waste Land, the poem seemed to address the anxieties of the Internet Age. Now, those words seem to point directly at Artificial Intelligence. One of the enduring questions behind Eliot’s poetry is how we can retain our essential humanity—our souls, if you will—in a world that seems designed to distract us to death with endless information. For me, one solution is taking a deeper dive into the art that speaks to my soul; not skimming the surface, but pursuing a more revelatory sense of the world within the words. That’s what Eliot was all about.
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