Perhaps all imaginative writing is an attempt to make sense of one’s life. What T. S. Eliot tells us repeatedly is that there are feelings that are beyond the nameable:

‘… the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves …’

Eliot believed that the single force of life is contained in what one biographer Lyndall Gordon calls the awful daring of a moment’s surrender. And from Eliot: ‘By this and this only, we have existed.’ The only mystery that really matters in our lives, he writes, is the meaning of existence under the cloud of unknowing. The single aim in life is to recover the divine.

Eliot wanted to express feelings that were strange and wild, determined to expose the people who read his work to feelings they had not experienced before. He said that the difference between:

‘a madman and an effective writer is that the former has feelings which are unique but cannot be shared, and are therefore useless; the latter discovers new variations of feelings which can be appropriated by others.’

In his attitudes to others, Eliot seems to have veered between an elitism and disdain for those he could not align himself with. Alongside the mystical poetry he expressed racism, anti-Semitism, and misogyny. Some of this can be explained by traditional attitudes and cultural assumptions of the time, and on misogyny from Eliot’s personal trauma around his first marriage, but Eliot, although deeply reflective, had disturbing blind spots that now leave the reader uncomfortable and alienated. For example, people pursuing ordinary lives he saw as ‘provincial’, and the pursuit of normality he saw as an adjustment to a ‘deranged society’ instead of what he described as the fundamental Order of Things. He wanted to find a way to use what he knew of ‘the perfect life of the spiritual elite to improve the life of ordinary people’ suggesting ‘prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.’ He wanted to rescue others from an ordinary life that he saw as ‘worthless banality’, and that an ordinary life can be transfigured

Perhaps some of Eliot’s disdain for others is in part a projection of his own self-dislike and judgement. He wrote of how when we cannot understand another person there is the ‘unconscious pressure on that person to turn him into something we can understand’. Eliot is writing of the human fear of not understanding something or someone that is human; that when we cannot understand another person, we put pressure on them, one way or another, to become something we can understand; this pressure is the sort of influence that represses and distorts. There can be an anxiety about not understanding those people – including oneself – that one cannot ignore. And not being able to ignore someone – or not being able to ignore something about oneself – is itself a kind of revelation of character. In a sense, we are what we are unable to ignore. And what we do with what we cannot ignore is at the heart of what Eliot referred to as ‘the dubious science of psychoanalysis’. Sceptical of psychoanalysis, he sought treatment from a psychiatrist, whose methods involved a variety of interventions focused on regaining control of thought and behaviour.

Weighed down for many years by guilt, linked to wrongs done to others: ‘the rending pain’ of recall, ‘the motives late revealed’ and ‘things ill done and done to others’ harm’, Eliot appears an isolated figure, but, aged 68, he married for the second time. Rejoicing in new found happiness, Eliot held on to life tenaciously in the face of chronic physical illness. In an interview after his death his wife Valerie Eliot stated: ‘He obviously needed to have a happy marriage. He couldn’t die until he had had it. There was… a little boy in him that had never been released.’