For her 80-minute documentary TS Eliot: Into The Waste Land (BBC Two) ****, director Susanna White was significantly aided by the 'buried treasure' element in the story of this famously elusive poem, long laboured over by critics and students. Sitting like a ticking time bomb in Princeton's archives was a cache of letters deposited there in 1970: the correspondence from Eliot's long relationship with an American woman, Emily Hale (he had had all her letters to him burnt.)Eliot's biographer, Lyndall Gordon, had long suspected Hale was the 'hyacinth girl' in a line he had cut from an early draft of The Waste Land but later reinstated.

https://theartsdesk.com/tv/ts-eliot-waste-land-bbc-two-four-quartets-starring-ralph-fiennes-bbc-four-review-great-100th

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