T. S. Eliot

The story of the relationship between writer, literary critic and publisher T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) and his second wife Esmé Valerie Fletcher (1926-2012).

Biography documentary on the writer for "The Hours" DVD special features.

A journey into the BBC archives unearthing glorious performances and candid interviews from some of Britain's greatest poets.

T. S. Eliot has been considered by many to be the leading American poet of this century. His contemporaries in the 1920s recognized in “The Waste Land” an expression of the exhaustion and fragmentation that afflicted so many in that post-war era. They also recognized the originality of Eliot’s poetic technique and admired his insistence on the need for spiritual values in an age of popular kitsch.

Murder in the Cathedral is a story about Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his struggles against temptation and personal vanity prior to his murder in the great Cathedral.

This documentary series uses drama and commentary to shed light on the lives and works of Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, T. S. Eliot, Henrik Ibsen, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Luigi Pirandello, Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf.