Eliot at smokefall
Barbara Everett, 24 January 1985
“... seen as deprived. Since his theme here is a writer’s destruction of his private self by the hunt for status, the dramatist has to take the self-evidently less successful partner, the poet’s wife, as the feeling centre of the play (the result reverses, that is, such images as we meet in Henry James’s stories of artists with ruthless and worldly ... ”