"I never at any time had sexual relations with [that woman] Emily Hale."  The words seem familiar, but they were uttered not by an accused U.S. president in January 1998, but by Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet, playwright, essayist, publishing editor, one of the important poets of the 20th century, who got the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, to his executor on November 25, 1960.  The sentence appears in public as a result of an important literary event, the release by Princeton University Library on January 2, 2020 of 1,131 letters written by Eliot to a former lady friend, once regarded as his "muse," Emily Hale, between 1930 and 1956. Eliot died in 1965 and Hale in 1969, so the letters appear now because of the arrangement by Hale, who had given them to Princeton, that the letters would be publicly available 50 years after their deaths.  This is a one-sided collection.  The letters of Hale to Eliot were destroyed at...(Read Full Post)