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London Review of Books

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Mark Ford

  • T.S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet by James E. Miller
  • The Annotated ‘Waste Land’ with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose by T.S. Eliot, edited by Lawrence Rainey
  • Revisiting ‘The Waste Land’ by Lawrence Rainey

Hart Crane, for one, was in no doubt about it. ‘He’s the prime ram of our flock,’ he insisted to Allen Tate in the summer of 1922. Tate was initially puzzled by the phrase, as well as by various other ‘signals’ his friend was making, but eventually came to understand Crane’s drift: ‘In those days,’ he later commented, ‘a lot of people like Hart had the delusion that Eliot was homosexual.’

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Mark Ford’s collections of poetry are Landlocked and Soft Sift. He is a professor of English at University College London.