It should come as no surprise that renowned speakers, scholars, and visionaries have flocked to Claremont since the Consortium’s early days. But even present-day Scripps College students may be impressed to hear—and perhaps a little jealous they weren’t there themselves!—that poet T.S. Eliot came to the College in 1932.
Journalist David Allen recently looked into this visit for the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. Eliot was a longtime friend of Emily Hale, who joined the Scripps faculty in 1932. A progressive woman for her time, Hale was a favorite among Scripps students.
Allen suspects the two had a romantic relationship, but “exactly what their relationship was, no one knows. There is speculation that it was quite chaste,” says Judy Harvey Sahak, the Sally Preston Swan Librarian of Denison Library.
While in Claremont, Eliot gave a lecture on nonsense poet Edward Lear in Balch Hall. He also visited many faculty homes – where he discussed great Western writers such as John Donne, Milton, and Shakespeare – and went on sailing excursions with Hale. These trips, arranged by Marie McSpadden Sands’34, were primarily so they could have uninterrupted time alone together.
Eliot left Claremont on January 6, 1933, after staying for about a week and a half. No photos of his visit have surfaced, nor do we know what Eliot thought of Claremont.
Hale and Eliot kept up their correspondence after he returned to England and would visit each other a few more times over the years. Between 1927 and 1957, Eliot wrote Hale an impressive 1,000 letters. Sahak and many scholars believe Eliot didn’t take Hale seriously as a love interest but instead put her “on a pedestal” as a feminine ideal.
Hale passed away in 1969, four years after Eliot’s death. It is said Eliot burned all of her letters after his second marriage. As for his letters to Hale, she donated them to Princeton, but with the stipulation that they cannot be read until January 1, 2020.
The Scripps community will look forward to that date to finally find out what kind of relationship our professor and the canonical poet actually had—and to see if Eliot was as impressed by Scripps as we are today.
You can read Allen’s original article at the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin.