Books and Manuscripts

Eliot, T.S.
Typed Letter, signed
London, December 11, 1930. Single sheet, 10 1/2 x 8 1/4 in. (268 x 210 mm). Typed letter on The Criterion stationery, signed by T.S. Eliot, to New York lawyer, G(eorge). Franklin Ludington: "Dear Sir, / I have your letter of the 17th ultimo. The line about / which you desire information is definitely and consciously and / intentionally an echo of the line of the Shakespeare sonnet. I / did not verify the quotation and it is perhaps accident, but I / think an happy accident, that I altered slightly the line. / There was a good review of the poem in the New York Sun. It / is interesting to think that Sir Edmund Chambers can throw light / on any line of mine; I wish I could reciprocate. / Yours very truly, / T.S. Eliot." Creasing from contemporary folds; three holes along left edge, small hole below Eliot's signature. Printed on pp. 428-429 in The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume 5: 1930-1931 (Yale University Press, 2015)

American poet T.S. Eliot writes to an admirer from New York, Franklin Ludington, who had inquired about the source of a line in his poem Ash Wednesday (1930). Ludington had noted that the fourth line in the poem, "Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope," had been cited by English literary critic and Shakespearean scholar Sir Edmund K. Chambers in his recent study of Shakespeare, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems. Ludington wrote to Eliot asking if "whether your line is an echo of a Shakespearean source, which I have not been able to discover, or whether it is illuminating but not illuminated by the Shakespearean connotation which Professor Chambers gives to it." (p. 428, The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume 5: 1930-1931). Eliot responds here in the affirmative, that the line "is definitely and consciously and intentionally an echo of the line of the Shakespeare sonnet." The line quoted by Eliot from Shakespeare was "Desiring this man's art and that man's scope" from Shakespeare's Sonnet 29. The review mentioned here by Eliot was "Eliot the Poet" by P.M. Jack, printed in the November 15, 1930 edition of the New York Sun.

Provenance
The Estate of G. Franklin Ludington, New York City.