TS Eliot’s hidden love letters reveal intense, heartbreaking affair

‘I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead,’ the poet wrote to Emily Hale

• TS Eliot’s intimate letters to confidante unveiled after 60 years

TS Eliot’s love letters to scholar Emily Hale, the great poet’s muse and source of “supernatural ecstasy” for more than 30 years, were released on Thursday amid fevered speculation and under tight security at an elegant library on the campus of the Ivy League’s Princeton University.

The Nobel laureate’s correspondence to Hale, whom he met when both were studying at Harvard University in 1912, has long been the fascination of Eliot scholars but remained hidden, on both the poet and Hale’s wishes, for 50 years after Hale’s death in 1969.

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