Our Greatest Pilgrim Poet?
When T.S. Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, it was not on the strength of the plays he had written that determined the choice of the Committee in Stockholm. Leaving aside Murder in the Cathedral, his moving dramatization of the death by martyrdom of Thomas Beckett, which came out in 1935, he’d scarcely written any plays at all. It was, rather, the poetry that justified the award…