2025: January, Version 1.1 ~ February, Version 1.2 ~ March, Version 1.3

G. Kim Blank, Department of English, University of Victoria

Up front: My thanks to Matt Huculak (Director, KULA Library Futures Academy, UVic) for his project enthusiasm, and for providing space on the University of Victoria Library Digital Exhibits website.

The Christmas-Card Series

Beginning in 1927 and running until 1931, and under the direction of Richard de la Mare (1901-86), Faber & Gwyer, London (to become Faber & Faber in 1929), publish thirty-eight pamphlet cards known as “The Ariel Poems.” There will be a reissue of some unsold cards in 1938. A second release of eight original poems—designated by Faber & Faber as the "new series"—is produced in 1954.

Faber & Gwyer's Autumn Catalogue for 1927 advertises the Ariel Poems in both commercial and literary terms:

"This series of little booklets consists of single previously unpublished poems, each suitably decorated in colours and dressed in the gayest wrappers. It has been designed to take the place of Christmas cards and other similar tokens that one sends for remembrance sake at certain seasons of the year. Some of the poems have Christmas as their subject: but a genuine poem is not a thing appropriate only to one season of the year, and any one of these poems with its attendant decorations would be a joy to read and see at any time, whatever the season might be."

Faber & Gwyer promote that they are doing something different, and that the "series of little booklets" has some special appeal. As they enthusiastically add to their catalogue announcement,

"For collectors of first editions it is worth remembering that most of these poems have been written specially for the series and that all of them appear here separately for the first time and are thus 'first editions'—and first editions that have been printed at the Curwen Press!"

The series is, at least initially, relatively successful; this is assured by commissioning a wide selection original art for the cards, including work by brothers Paul and John Nash, Barnett Freedman, Eric Ravilious, poet-artist David Jones, and Eric Gill. Four of the illustrations for Eliot's Ariel Poems are by American-born Edward Leland Kauffer (1890-1954), who eventually went by the name Edward McKnight Kauffer, and by E. McKnight Kauffer for much of his art.

The Christmas card Ariel Poems are significant or interesting enough of a publishing event that, in the initial year of their release—1927, nos. 1-8—they are reviewed in a couple of prominent places. For example, in The Spectator, for 3 September 1927, an 800-word review by “Lemon Grey” is mainly indifferent: “Anybody who buys this handful of booklets may find plenty to quarrel with: but there is live stuff in them, and that is what really matters.” And in The Times Literary Supplement for 24 November, Edmund Blunden, himself an Ariel series poet to-be for the 1928 series (as well as being openly non-Modernist in his tastes), comments that although the card illustrations “mostly missed the spirit of the [Christmas] occasion,” at least the poems “seem to show that the most anxious or feverish mood of modern times is passing, and that poetry at least resumes her true estate, gratitude and serenity.”

Eliot's Animula

Printed by the Curwen Press, Plaistow (East London), and published 9 October 1929 in a run of 3,000 copies, T. S. Eliot’s Animula is No. 23 in the sequence of Ariel Christmas-card poems; it sells for 1 shilling, as indicated on the accompanying green envelope. [1] On 28 October, 400 large-paper copies—numbered and signed by 41-year-old Eliot—are published, though these larger cards were intended mainly as gifts for friends, valued patrons, and other writers within the Faber circle; this limited edition is nevertheless priced at 7 shillings 6 pence.

Both versions of Animula—the smaller trade card and the larger-paper edition—have two wood-engravings (one in colour) by sculptor, illustrator, and wood-engraver Gertrude Hermes (1901-83; Hermes is, at this time, married to Blair Hughes-Stanton [1902-81], who illustrated two earlier cards in the Ariel series). [2] Eliot will, in November 1931, say that he didn’t really like the larger wood engraving (of a naked male juggling), and that he "tried to make a change" but was "not at all happy" with it. More generally, Eliot declares that he prefers “not an illustration but a design” to accompany poetry, given that “the illustrator will merely impose his own particular interpretation of the poem upon the reader.” Eliot adds that he thinks “the market for those Christmas card poems is pretty well exhausted.” [3]

During 1929, Eliot will publish almost one prose piece about every two weeks, but Animula is the only poem Eliot publishes for 1929.

The first reprinting of Animula is in 1934, in a collection called Modern Things, edited by Parker Tyler (New York, The Galleon Press), which also contains forward-looking poetry by, among others, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, E. E. Cummings, and Louis Zukofsky. Triumphal March, Eliot's fifth Ariel poem (1931), will be the first poem in Parker's anthology; Animula will be the second.

Eliot contributes a poem in the Ariel series for each of the six years it runs (Walter de la Mare does the same). His other poems are Journey of the Magi (1927, no. 8 in the Ariel series), A Song for Simeon (1928, no. 16), Marina (1930, no. 29), Triumphal March (1931, no. 35), and The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (1954, when the series is shortly revived in a larger format with eight poems by prominent poets). In later collected editions of his poems, Eliot will use the series name to nominate his grouping as the “Ariel Poems”: he claimed nobody wanted the title, so, somewhat haphazardly, he took it himself; Eliot does not, however, always include all six of his poems in these collections. [4] Eliot will later say in an interview for New York Times Book Review (29 November 1953) that "I thought my career was over after 'The Hollow Men'," but his “promise” to Faber to contribute to the Ariel series in fact “released the stream” for him to once more write poetry [see note no. 6 below for more about this].

Other notable writers who contribute to the Ariel series include Thomas Hardy (1927, no. 1); Walter de la Mare (1927-1931, nos. 4, 11, 20, 31, 33); G. K. Chesterton (1927, 1929-1930; nos. 5, 21, 25); Siegfried Sassoon (1927-1928, 1930-1931, nos. 7, 14, 27, 34 ); W. B. Yeats (1929, no. 18); Edith Sitwell (1928, 1931; nos. 15, 36); “AE” (1929, no. 19); and D. H. Lawrence (1930, no. 28); the "new series" of 1954 pamphlet-cards include poems by W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, and Stephen Spender. The full lineup of Ariel poets has a good portion of the who’s-who of poets writing in English over the first half of the twentieth century.

Animula Contexts

At the time of composing and publishing Animula, American-born Eliot works for Faber & Faber (though there is only one “Faber”—Geoffrey), having been taken on with an initial five-year contract in the autumn of 1925 at £475 a year, when the company is Faber & Gwyer (Eliot first meets Geoffrey in December 1924). As he writes to his brother, Henry, on 19 October 1929, Eliot's salary has, at his own request, been reduced to £400, given reorganizational issues involving The Criterion. As Eliot also tells his brother, he came to Faber "primarily as editor"; his position, though, quickly expands to also involve much vetting of submissions, recruiting writers, endless blurb-writing, and then directly dealing with authors—at the same time he also makes sure to bring some "business sense" into the firm by hiring Frank Morley, who has some commercial expertise; Eliot, in fact, is proud to report to Henry that he has "sold a bond to invest in shares in the new firm." Eliot in that 1953 interview in the New York Times Book Review will say that looking "at so much inferior stuff all the time" took away some of his "appetite for literature altogether." Eliot did have pressures in his selection of writers: Geoffrey Faber naturally wants to turn a profit, as he does with the Ariel Christmas-card series. This isn’t a given, since Faber & Faber’s publishing inclinations are belletristic. Fortunately for the company, via the pre-1925 Gwyer side of the company, it inherits a line of medical publications (nominally the Scientific Press), and this helps to keep the company in the black; selling its main resource, a magazine called The Nursing Mirror, lands them with significant cash in 1929; the medical publications continue with Faber & Faber for about another fifty years.

In joining the publisher, Eliot leaves a position at Lloyds Bank in London, where, for eight years, and advancing quickly, he ends up in the Colonial & Foreign Department. His work ethic and polyglottal skills set him ahead. In the last phase of his employment at Lloyds, he heads its Intelligence Department; he eventually oversees a staff of seven. Despite the nagging of many friends to invest his full energies in literature, it is not easy for Eliot, at age thirty-seven, to leave the security—and the challenges—of working for Lloyds, where he deals with the complexities of international, real-world banking policy at an interesting historical moment of both financial growth and post-war debts, and where, in fact, he develops some lasting friendships.

In 1922, while working for Lloyds, Eliot founds and edits one of the premier literary magazines of the era: The Criterion. Eliot has had experience: through his early mentor, Ezra Pound (1885-1972), in 1917 he had worked as Assistant Editor (and contributor/reviewer) for The Egotist, a Modernist journal which ends publication in 1919 (most noteworthy, it publishes James Joyce’s A Portrait of a Young Man, parts of Joyce’s Ulysses, and Wyndam Lewis’ Tarr). The first issue of The Criterion in October 1922 (of 600 copies) includes a seminal and darkly uncertain poem by Eliot, sculpted by experimental, modernist techniques, layered by allusional complexity, and enmeshed with historical crises and Eliot’s own personal uncertainties: The Waste Land. The poem is subsequently published in the US in The Dial, November 1922; The Waste Land becomes a seminal Modernist text.

Eliot vets countless submissions while overseeing The Criterion. He shapes the direction of the journal with his critical views: he writes over sixty editorial-commentaries, and he develops a recognizable iconoclastic tone, which he had begun to hone in his 1920 essay collection, The Sacred Wood. Because of Eliot, the journal manages to bridge conservative and traditional literary values with Modernist and avant-garde work. He recruits writers like Virginia Woolf, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, Wyndam Lewis, Kathleen Raine, Dylan Thomas, as well sounding a clear internationalist, cosmopolitan agenda in premiering writers like Marcel Proust, Albert Camus, and Herman Hesse. Early on, Eliot records that taking on The Criterion completely exhausts him, and a history of its various funding and nominal incarnations show its ups and downs, along with Eliot’s. The Criterion ceases publication in January 1939, on the brink of World War II; buried within this last issue are Eliot’s “Final Words,” expressing, in his own terms, editorial “staleness” and personal “discontent.”

Making the period of Eliot’s affiliation with Faber even more complex and uneven, in 1925, Eliot’s wife of ten years, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, suffers serious health issues, both physical and psychological. This is predicted a few years earlier, in 1921, when Eliot himself suffers from some kind of depression-related breakdown before re-entering his life of letters. But as Eliot moves forward in the mid-1920s, his wife’s condition fully distresses and taxes him; he has moments of what seem to him as hopeless fatigue; he expresses being overwhelmed and even paralyzed by work and personal commitments. Medically attending to Vivien—which Eliot prefers over “Vivienne”—becomes a personal and financial burden. Eliot will separate from Vivien in 1933; she dies in 1947, having spent the last decade of her life committed to an asylum, with some suggestion of behind-the-scene promptings by Eliot. Vivien’s anonymous contributions—as “F. M.”—to The Criterion over 1924-1925 are somewhat undervalued, though also complicated by Eliot’s overseeing all of the journal’s published work, including editing the work of “F. M.”; her shared reflections on Eliot’s poetry are minor but not unimportant.

The mid-1920s sees one part of Eliot attracted to right-wing views. In February 1924, he writes to his mother that his political and social opinions are “reactionary and ultra-conservative.” While this might sound extreme, such sentiments are certainly in the air at the moment, and often amongst the intelligentsia. But Eliot’s views are neither entirely sympathetic to communism nor rising Fascist politics, as his review of five books about Fascism (in The Criterion, December 1928) makes clear; more than anything, Eliot hoped for a new, engaged form of democracy, though his leanings are tinged, as it were, with some elitist and royalist sentiments tied to older traditions.

Eliot working at Faber & Gwyer, March 1926; photo taken by his brother, Henry; Houghton Library, Harvard University, MS Am. 2650 (186).

1927 and Onwards

In June 1927, Eliot converts to Anglo-Catholicism. He is secretly baptised and then immediately confirmed (confirmation requires baptism). This is as complex and interesting as it might seem odd—maybe more so for a thirty-nine-year-old. It certainly surprises, even shocks, some of his friends who, like Virginia Woolf, worry it might dull his creativity; it didn’t. Eliot’s family religious background, formed as it was around somewhat progressive Unitarian values, did not offer guidance about more decisive beliefs and practices that he seemed to crave. Thus his searching philosophical and unsteady spiritual disposition (with his early attraction to mysticism, Eastern spiritual thought, and specifically to Buddhist scepticism) makes his conversion to rooted, disciplined, and liturgical pursuits much less surprising. Eliot felt that life held a void, and, with his wavering ascetic impulses, he craved some representation of order; in short, he wanted a more defined belief system, or at least the tenets of one to grasp toward and to practice. Holding the deep, traditional values of the church, with the more absolute pronouncements—about good and evil, atonement and original sin, birth and death—also offered Eliot much to creatively engage. More personally, for Eliot, through the idea of a sacramental life and possibility of fulfilment, came habits he hoped might shape his own discipline in the form of guidance and control—in, for example, the simple, ceremonial habit of attending mass. Also, for Eliot, problems of the body—his own physical body—often confused and disturbed him, ranging from sexual and aging issues to his more or less continuous history of medical difficulties. [5] A somewhat simplified overview is that Eliot is attracted to how Anglo-Catholicism turns to questions of spiritual salvation in the context of both historical chaos and in struggles with his personal discomposure. [6]

Later in 1927, Eliot has another conversion of sorts: he is naturalized as a British subject, renouncing his American citizenship. He also fully commits himself to his employer and to writing: work-wise, during the year, Eliot in prose averages just short of one piece every week, mainly reviews and essayistic commentaries. The only poem he publishes for 1927 is his first Ariel poem, Journey of the Magi.

Looking ahead, we come to a powerful and somewhat uniquely odd tension in Eliot the poet: he is powerfully attracted to the stability and traditions and trappings of belief, along with the embedded mysteries of disenchantment, indecision, and reincarnation; and yet, formally, his verse is startlingly Modernist—that is, non-traditional—in its form, phrasing, and testing (if not arcane) allusions.

By the end of the 1930s, under Eliot's guidance, Faber & Faber more or less establishes the canon of modern—and Modernist—English literature, and of poetry in particular. This is sounded in the remarkable collection published in 1936: The Faber Book of Modern Verse, edited by Michael Roberts. The collection, overseen by Eliot, has Roberts' understated declaration that the anthology's purpose is to include poems which "add to the resources of poetry, to be likely to influence the future development of poetry and language" (Introduction, p.2). In the anthology we find, among others, Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats, T. E. Hume, Ezra Pound, H.D., Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, D. H. Lawrence, Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, John Crowe Ransom, Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Laura Riding, Robert Graves, Edith Sitwell, William Empson, C. Day Lewis, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, and Dylan Thomas. And of course there's Eliot, with three of the seven poems in his selection in fact being Ariel poems. Additionally, in his capacities with Faber & Faber, he manages to foster, publish, and promote other important writers of the age, such as Stephen Spender, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. And within his circle we find writers Wyndham Lewis and Virginia Wolf. Even toward the end of his time with Faber & Faber, he has sharp eye for new poets, like Ted Hughes, who is taken on by Faber & Faber in 1957.

Eliot, then, in not just the patriarchal centre of Faber & Faber's literary tastes and editorial practices, but very arguably the central figure in twentieth-century literature. Around Faber's office, he becomes known as "Uncle Tom," and for Pound, Eliot is "the Possum."

To the End

A year after the death of Vivien in 1948, Eliot, aged sixty, wins the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In 1957, and quite secretly one very early January morning, Eliot marries Valerie Fletcher. He has known her for eight years, when she is a secretary at Faber & Faber (Eliot proposes via a very polite letter); she has known all about Eliot since her early teens, when she seems to be seriously drawn to him after hearing a recording of his poetry being read—which, coincidently, happens to be the most significant of the Ariel poems, The Journey of the Magi (1927). Valerie is 30 at the time of their marriage; Eliot 68. Toward the end of 1957, Eliot believes he is past being useful to Faber & Faber—and that, in fact, he feels he is being overpaid (letter to Geoffrey Faber, 26 October 1952).

In 1965, less than eight very happy years with Valerie, and after a long history of chain-smoking and suffering from emphysema, Eliot passes away, aged 76. Valerie, as literary executor of Eliot-related material, will become a protective yet crucial editor of Eliot’s poetry and letters. She will generously distribute much of the fortune made via the worldwide profits of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, a 1981 musical based on Eliot’s 1939 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. Faber & Faber also financially benefit from Cats. Valerie passes in 2012, aged 86.

Eliot, then, is professionally associated with Faber & Faber for forty years, and the publisher still manages a great deal of Eliot’s work, along with handling the rights of the Estate of T. S. Eliot. Today, Faber & Faber often refers to Eliot as its first "Poetry Editor."

Faber & Faber remains an independent publisher that still privileges the belletristic tradition—it sees itself as a literary press. Its authors have achieved significant recognition, including numerous Noble Prize laureates, Booker Prize winners, Whitbread Book of Year winners on a few occasions, and a large number of prizes awarded to its poets.

Notes

[1] The Curwen Press has a history tied to music printing, letter-press work, type-face design, lithography, graphic reproduction, fine illustrative printing, and French-language work.

[2] On an Animula trade version card marked “proof copy” held by the Morgan Library (call number 128313), the married name of Hermes appears on the front cover (wrapper): “Wood Engravings by | GERTRUDE HUGHES-STANTON”. Hermes is separated from Hughes-Stanton by 1931 and divorced by 1933. The reasons for the change on the published Animula card could be either professional or personal on the part of Hermes—or both; or simply a mistaken presumption on the part of the typesetter.

[3] Letter to Emily Hale, 24 Nov. 1931; The Eliot-Hale Letters, ed. John Haffenden, The Estate of T. S. Eliot, 2022. Perhaps the most interesting thing to happen to Animula after publication was that is was seized by US Customs in 1932, ostensibly for Hermes' illustration of the nude male figure.

[4] For example, in Eliot's Collected Poems 1909-1935 (1936) in the section designated as Ariel Poems, he does not include Triumphal March (1931 series) or The Cultivation of Christmas Trees (1954 series). In Eliot's Collected Poems 1909-1962, The Ariel Poems section includes The Cultivation of Christmas Trees, but Triumphal March is still not included, since he sees it as part of his unfinished project, Coriolan; instead, in Collected Poems 1909-1962, Triumphal March along with Difficulties of a Statesmen are in a section called "Unfinished Poems," with the subtitle Coriolan. In the 1940 collection The Waste Land and Other Poems, Eliot includes two Ariel Poems: Journey of the Magi and Marina. The breaking-up of the original six Christmas-card poems strongly suggests that Eliot did not see them as a cohesive set or of equal critical worth. Almost fifty years after Eliot's death, Faber & Faber will publish all six together: The Ariel Poems: Illustrated Poems for Christmas (2014). Various critical efforts to view the six Ariel Poems as a unified thematic or topical group usually point to their clear diversity, as if variousness constitutes connectedness.

[5] Eliot experienced various medical issues: he suffered with a congenital double hernia throughout his life (he sometimes wore a truss); he also had lung and breathing difficulties, nasal issues, and neuralgia. In his adult life he often falls into moments of more general, perhaps psycho-somatic, illness, by which we cannot do much better than to call "nervous problems." Imagery of illness and body affliction often appear in Eliot's poetry.

[6] Eliot's formal turn to Anglo-Catholicism after conversion is sounded in Journey of the Magi (1927), Ash-Wednesday (1930), and in the four poems (East Coker [1940], Burnt Norton [1941], The Dry Salvages [1941], Little Gidding [1942]) that make up Four Quartets (1943). Here, in these poems, scaffolded with much Christian symbolism, we find an open yet complex engagement with the struggle to have faith replace skepticism, with the integration of time with timelessness, as well as with the meaning of renunciation and penitence. Ash-Wednesday has some particular thematic connections with Animula, in that it too is set into the personalized tensions of the time between death and birth; likewise, Ash-Wednesday has a chronological and connection with the earlier Ariel Poems, given that Eliot composed parts of Ash-Wednesday over 1927-1928, and he went on record to say that his promise to write some poetry for the Ariel series "released the stream, and led directly to Ash-Wednesday" (interview with John Lehmann, New York Times, 29 November 1953).

University of Victoria Copy no. 1 of T. S. Eliot's Animula (autographed and numbered 152):

University of Victoria Copy no. 2 of T. S. Eliot's Animula (autographed and numbered 365):

University of Victoria copy of the T. S. Eliot's Animula Christmas trade card, with the original envelope:

Animula Contexts: Selected Sources & Works Cited

Blunden, Edmund. “The Ariel Poems.” The Times Literary Supplement, 24 November 1927, p. 873.

Eliot, T. S. The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd: 1920. [New York: Alfred A. Knoph, 1921.]

T. S. Eliot. "The Hollow Men," first published in Poems | 1909-1925. Faber & Gwyer, 1925.

Eliot, T. S. “The Silurist.” Dial, vol. 3 no. 83 (September) 1927, pp. 259-63. [Review of Edmund Blunden’s On the Poems of Henry Vaughan.]

Eliot, T. S. “The Literature of Fascism.” Criterion, vol. 8 no. 31 (December) 1928, pp. 280-290.

Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1935. London: Faber & Faber, 1936.

Eliot, T. S. “Final Words.” The Criterion, no. 18 (January) 1939, pp. 269-275.

Eliot, T. S. Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. London: Faber& Faber, 1939. [The illustrated version, by Nicolas Bentley, appears a year later.]

Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1940.

Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963.

Eliot, T. S. The Ariel Poems: Illustrated Poems for Christmas. London: Faber & Faber, 2014.

Eliot, Valerie, and John Haffenden, editors. The Letters of T. S. Eliot | Volume 4: 1928-1929. New Haven & London, 2013.

Fussell, Paul. "Modernism, Adversary Culture, and Edmund Blunden." The Sewanee Review, vol. 94, no. 4 (Fall, 1986), pp. 583-601.

Haffenden, John, editor. The Eliot-Hale Letters. The Estate of T. S. Eliot, 2022. [<https://tseliot.com/the-eliot-hale-letters> / <tseliot.com>]

Gallup, Donald. T. S. Eliot | A Bibliography | Including Contributions to Periodicals and Foreign Translations. London: Faber & Faber, 1952.

Gordon, Lyndall. The Hyacinth Girl: T. S. Eliot’s Hidden Muse. London: Virago Press, 2022.

Grey, Lemon. “The Ariel Poems.” The Spectator, 3 September 1927, p. 24.

Lehmann, John. “T. S. Eliot Talks About Himself and the Drive to Create.” New York Times (Book Reviews), 29 November 1953, p. 5 and cont’d p. 44.

Ricks, Christopher and Jim McCue, editors. The Poems of T. S. Eliot. Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.

Roberts, Michael, editor. The Faber Book of Modern Verse. London, Faber & Faber, 1936.

Tyler, Parker, editor. Modern Things. New York: The Galleon Press, 1934.