Before “The Waste Land” and his becoming one of the greatest poets of all time, T.S. Eliot was a man in love. His lover was named Emily Hale, a teacher at Concord Academy from 1944 to 1947. Their decades-long, non-marital relationship was a rather complicated one, nearly overlapping with both of Eliot’s matrimonies, yet it holds tremendous value. In Eliot’s biographies, Hale’s existence, as his paramour, was often eclipsed by his two wives. Nevertheless, she was acknowledged by those who did know her as Eliot’s ‘silenced muse’: she was the ‘hyacinth girl’ in “The Waste Land”; biographer Lyndall Gordon remarked that “to read Eliot’s letters to Emily during the thirties and early forties is to enter poems in the making.” For readers of the Centipede and affiliates of CA, it demonstrates the way our school has amazingly crossed paths with such a literary giant: not only was CA a substantial subject of Eliot and Hale’s letters, the Nobel-Prize-winning author also gave the commencement speech for CA’s class of 1947.
Emily Hale was an American speech and drama teacher; she was born on October 27, 1891, in East Orange, New Jersey and died on October 12, 1969 in Concord, Massachusetts. She graduated from Miss Porter’s School but never attended college. This handicapped her career but did not extinguish her passion for theater and teaching. Tirelessly, she taught speech and drama at schools like Milwaukee-Downer College, Scripps College, Smith College, the then all-girls schools Concord Academy and Abbot Academy—now merged with Philips Academy Andover—where she did not retire until she was forced to by the mandatory retirement age. Even after this, she acted in a number of plays and maintained close relationships with her students, proving her persistent fervor for life.
Eliot met Hale at his cousin’s home in 1912, after which she became an important figure in Eliot’s Harvard days. In an unpublished memoir, Eliot wrote that he fell in love with her before leaving for Europe in 1914. In 1915, however, he married another woman and did not see Hale for many years. During this period, they exchanged letters; 1,131 are known as they were preserved and donated to Princeton University by Hale. At her request, the letters were sealed until 2020—fifty years after her death—and they were finally made public online in January 2023.
The frequency of Eliot and Hale’s correspondence lessened when, to Hale’s disappointment, Eliot married a second woman following his first wife’s death. It is strange that Eliot repeatedly turned away from the woman he so clearly cherished; this seems to come from Eliot’s realized desire to “reinvent” himself. He felt guilty at his past, both by his deteriorating, loveless first marriage and his passion for a woman that was not his wife. This can be seen in his play The Family Reunion, written during this critical period of his life, that centered on a guilt-ridden husband after the death of his wife; Hale was said to have inspired one of its characters. In this rejection of his past self, Eliot ordered that his love letters with Hale be burned, marking their relationship’s anticlimactic end.
Among the roughly one thousand Eliot-Hale letters, Concord Academy makes more than a dozen appearances. Beyond mere mentions, Eliot often inquired about events at CA that Hale took part in, such as her direction of the play Richard II in 1947 and her instruction on ‘Speaking in Public’ to a student society named ‘Current Events,’ an existing club today.
Eliot often teased Hale’s workplace superior, Josephine Tucker: the two shared a running joke equating the former Head of School (1940-1949) as the Ukrainian-born American entertainer Sophie Tucker (1886-1966), known for her nickname “the Last of the Red-Hot Mamas.” It may come as an amusing surprise, then, for affiliates of CA that Eliot wrote on December 8th, 1946: “I have had a cable from Miss Sophie Tucker [to arrange his commencement speech], and am debating how I should answer it.”
Though Eliot eventually appeared at CA’s 1947 commencement, the process was rather arduous, for the author expressed much reluctance. However, on June 3rd of 1947, the twenty-fifth year since the establishment of Concord Academy and the publication of The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot arrived at Concord Academy to deliver his commencement address to a graduating class of seventeen senior girls.
At Emily Hale’s request, Eliot obliged to speak at Concord Academy in early June. On Easter Day (April 6th) of 1947, Eliot wrote Ms. Hale a letter stressing the chaos of his responsibilities and travels in May and June: a lecture at the Frick Gallery in New York on May 3, for a sum of 400 dollars; a reading at Wellesley College on May 5; a reading at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre on May 7; a reading at Princeton on May 19; a reading at Yale’s Sprague Memorial Hall on May 26; an address at Harvard’s Commencement on June 5; an address at Princeton’s Commencement, June 17. Considering the limited time between these promised appearances, Eliot wrote that a commencement address (scheduled for June 4 at the time) at Concord Academy would have been “most difficult” to arrange.
On March 18th, 1947, prior to his letter to Ms. Hale, Eliot wrote to Dorothy Richards, writing: “I have agreed, to oblige a friend, to give the prize-day address at a school in Concord on the 4th June, a task I dislike exceedingly.” With all these difficulties and Eliot’s negative attitude, it’s astonishing that he made it to CA, much less wrote eleven pages for the address.
The only motivation for T.S. Eliot to allocate time for a high school commencement, especially among opportunities to speak at the most prestigious universities in the world, was to follow his promise to Emily Hale. It has been stated that on the subject of the commencement, Eliot “regarded it as his hardest performance during this period” (Hyacinth Girl, page 299). In January of 1947, his estranged wife Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot had passed away in a mental asylum. Eliot had arranged for a formal separation in February of 1938 after seventeen years of an unsatisfactory marriage and being in love with Ms. Hale.
Though he had not visited Mrs. Eliot once in the nine years she had lived in the Northumberland House mental hospital, her death changed him: “I had no idea until the moment came, of the way in which a death – the death of someone never loved or desired – would make me see myself” (The Eliot–Hale Letters, February 14, 1947). He wrote to Ms. Hale on January 22nd, the exact day of his wife’s death, stating: “At the moment I feel quite dazed, and at the same time all the nightmare of the past flows back…I think that for the present our own plans and deliberations should be kept to ourselves…We have many practical problems to solve.” The “plans and deliberations” were discussions of marriage between Eliot and Hale. By June of 1947, the great poet and the teaching actress had agreed to cool their passions for each other, subtly reflected in the commencement address for the CA Class of 1947.
On the day of the commencement, originally scheduled to take place outdoors, the summer sky was darkened with grey clouds and dampened by rain. Eliot appeared on stage in the gymnasium among the other speakers, fiddling with his glasses and notes, and rose to fill the audience’s anticipating ears. “On Poetry,” the title of Eliot’s commencement address, begins with a humorous statement on memory. He confesses that he cannot recall the commencement address at his own high school graduation, nor does he remember any of the commencement addresses he has delivered in the past. He provides insight on making a memorable speech,“if one wants to make a speech that anybody will remember, or get anything out of, it is best to talk about something that one really knows about. It is still better if it is a subject that the listeners believe you know something about.”
Though he understood the diverse interests of his audience, positing that the speech will appeal not only to those passionate about poetry, but also those averse to the subject matter, Eliot primarily uses poetry as the conduit to talk about success and give guidance to the graduating class. As careers, Eliot says, artistic occupations are not the best avenues to success nor income. Unlike other arts, however, poetry is not a full-time job—one can (and should) juggle an uncreative and well-paying job while writing poetry. This ‘juggling’ is of utmost importance: if one is too successful at their job, they will lose time for poetry; if one is too absorbed with writing poetry, they cannot make a sufficient income.
One can generalize this to balancing creativity and materialistic needs. Eliot encourages ambition while discouraging comparison, illustrating a philosophy particularly applicable to academic environments: “I do not see any reason why people who succeed should not take pride in their success, so long as they do not look down on the less successful, or blind themselves to the other respects in which they have failed.” T.S. Eliot talks about his own work, framing The Waste Land as a project to “relieve [his] own feelings”, and Murder in the Cathedral as a formal obligation to the festival he wrote it for. These ideas are still relevant today, in the way we appear as our academic selves.
Arguably the most interesting topic of this speech is Eliot’s perspective on the function of poetry. Poems written without an external recipient are the most powerful because they need not persuade anyone. Eliot believes that persuasive prose is all too common, and values text encouraging readers’ reflections on their own opinions compared to text reflecting an author's opinion. He preaches that “nobody is altogether a “success” in life, but that everybody is more or less a failure…that nobody should be so desperate as to believe that he has wholly failed; and that nobody should be so complacent as to believe that he has succeeded.”
When considering this address, we must consider the circumstances under which T.S. Eliot gave them. In the year of 1947, he had already lost his first (albeit estranged) wife and his brother. His proclaimed “love” for Ms. Hale had begun to falter, their correspondence burned with less passion than before, and he no longer considered marriage feasible between the two of them. His notes on the commencement address for CA’s class of 1947 contained crossed out musings about marriage, comparing the act of writing poetry to being married. He wrote about how marriage reveals facets of one’s partner, and articulated that he found problems in every moment.