Sky Arts to celebrate T.S. Eliot

This December Sky Arts will premiere a brand new documentary exploring the life of one of the greatest poets of the twentieth Century, T.S. Eliot.

T.S. Eliot was born in the United States in 1888, becoming one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land and Four Quartets are amongst the finest poems ever written.

[pullquote]‘A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love,  or mere loneliness’[/pullquote]

Intriguingly, Eliot’s collection Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is also the inspiration for the enduring smash-hit stage show Cats, soon to be released as a star-studded Hollywood movie on December 20th. T.S. Eliot’s life is to be brought to life in a revealing new documentary made by Odyssey Television and premiering on Sky Arts on Sunday 15th December.

T.S. Eliot The Search for Happiness is both an exploration of Eliot’s life as a poet, playwright, essayist and critic and an examination of Eliot’s personal and spiritual journey.

The poet’s first marriage, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, in 1915 ended unhappily. Soon after the marriage she had an affair with Eliot’s friend and teacher Bertrand Russell, leaving Eliot betrayed. They separated in 1933 and Vivienne was finally committed by her brother in 1938 to an asylum in which she died nine years later, never seeing Eliot again. Of his first marriage he wrote: ‘To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came ‘The Waste Land.’

It was late in life that Eliot himself found happiness, when at the age of 68 he secretly married his secretary Valerie Fletcher, a woman thirty-eight years younger than himself. Eliot and Valerie were well-travelled and regular theatre-goers… something which, together with Eliot’s own love of cats, must have influenced Valerie when, many years after her husband’s death, she unexpectedly agreed that Old Possum’s Poems could be adapted by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn into the show we know now as Cats.

The documentary is summarised as ‘a portrayal of how a man found happiness late in life’.