TS Eliot's letters to his "muse" finally available

TS Eliot had a long-term epistolary relationship with Emily Hale, a philosophy teacher, and his 1000 letters to her are now available at Princeton University (the library had to wait 50 years after both their deaths). Here’s an article about the letters.

Another more snarky article recounts the nasty letter Eliot insisted on leaving at the Harvard Library, to be revealed at the same time as the collection. This letter expresses his dismay that his letters were going to be revealed. (He also says, basically, “I never liked her! She was dumb!”)

Now, now, we don’t have to think the poet is a worthy man to admire the poetry.

From East Coker, TS Eliot

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony 
Of death and birth.

                         You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again,
Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
  You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
  You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
  You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
  You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.