James Edwin Miller (1920–2010)

There's plenty of information in this book. But just so you know what you're getting: it's not a narrative biography. It's not even a biography really. It's more like a digest of the first volume of T. S. Eliot's letters, read with an eye to 'proving' that Eliot was homosexual. This all leads to much use of the biographer's 'must have' and 'surely,' as in, "Given that Eliot had gay friends, Eliot must have been homosexual" or "Given that Eliot powdered his face and read Havelock Ellis, he surely was homosexual." That's my digest of the book, in which wherever there's a tube, there's a phallus, and wherever there are two men, there's gay sex. Being 'homosexual' is a fixed attribute, apparently, kind of like being six foot two. None of that silly sexuality is a continuum nonsense here.
Even if we leave aside its from tendentiousness, the argument is circular. One example of the general argumentative strategy: we're told on 283 that "It is possible to read "Eeldrop and Appleplex as quite revelatory of Eliot's psyche." Miller then provides a reading of the story which concludes that "although this short story has regrettably been forgotten, it is of interest for the light it sheds on Eliot's life." That is if you approach a text as telling us something about a poet's life, then that text will tell you something about that poet's life. Extraordinary insight! And all the more upsetting, because I would like to know more about this story, which really has been forgotten.

Okay, I could rant all day. Point is, you might want to look at this in a library if you're writing a paper about Eliot's early poetry. There's plenty of facts here. But it by no means suggests, let alone proves, that Eliot was an 'American Poet,' nor that homosexuality was an enormous influence on his poetry. And the writing is so atrocious that I must caution everyone against trying to read it all the way through.… (mehr)