The letter, like many others in the two thick volumes of Eliot’s correspondence, sheds light on his daily life, interests and concerns; but it is hardly poetic. Since his death, much of Eliot’s private and personal writing has been published, including a copy of the draft version of The Waste Land (despite Eliot’s stipulation that it was not for publication), and Inventions of the March Hare, which reproduced and annotated a notebook that included early poems, scraps and notes. This posthumous publication of almost everything Eliot is known to have written has turned into a virtual industry: the discovery of each new letter is reported in the New York Times or the Guardian. To a large extent, Eliot encouraged this. He once stated in a lecture that his private letters to friends were written with an eye on his legacy. Undoubtedly, the insatiable and enduring interest in Eliot’s unpublished writings also stems from the strength of his poetry. Those who admire his poems will be hungry for more; for anything. But it also stems from a particular way of seeing poets. The reputation of a poet such as Eliot feeds back on itself. It reaches hagiographic proportions, and not even the sight of the great poet seeking advice on whether to sell his stock at ‘60 or 65’ is able to bring him back to reality.

This hagiographic approach to poetry often makes for poor criticism; it tends to blind the critic to the possibility of flaws in both the poet and the poems. This is in spite of the fact that it is the cult of the poet that results in the discovery and publication of material that exposes him or her as human, with all his or her attendant imperfections. In Eliot’s case, for instance, The Waste Land drafts show the extent to which the final poem was almost accidental. Its eventual shape resulted from Ezra Pound’s many and intrusive suggestions, which included cutting entire slabs of poem. But the messiness was brilliantly and deliberately disguised, particularly by the inclusion of the notes, which added to the sense that the poem’s loose strands were parts of a coherent whole – the observations of an omnipresent Tiresias – and must be invested with some larger purpose.

Nonetheless, the proliferation of hagiographic criticism of Eliot continues. It is the guiding spirit behind this new book by Craig Raine, a poet and literary critic at Oxford, who, as Eliot did, edits a literary journal (Areté) and who has worked as poetry editor at Faber and Faber. The book is part of OUP’s Lives and Legacies series, which has included studies of Winston Churchill, Isaac Newton and Walt Whitman, and which aims to explore the life and work of leading figures in politics, the arts and science.

Raine’s focus is more squarely on the work than on the life. The result is a series of analyses of Eliot’s major poems, in roughly chronological order. Raine’s approach is to read closely. Unfortunately, for the most part, he reads too closely. While there is a plentiful sprinkling of well-wrought insights into the poetry, the overall result is at times tedious and ultimately disappointing.

Raine tries to read into Eliot’s work a central theme, which he then labels ‘the buried life’. He claims that Eliot’s poetry consistently explores the failure to realise or to recognise one’s own emotional potential, an idea Eliot is said to have inherited from Matthew Arnold. In Raine’s view, Eliot’s concern with the failure not only to describe one’s inner life but to understand its machinations is what makes his poetry both classicist and modernist. After quoting lines from Arnold’s poem ‘The Buried Life’ that refer to the failure to articulate ‘the nameless feelings’ that go ‘forever unexpressed’, Raine elucidates his theme: ‘This is both a romantic position: we are failing to live, because we are not in touch with our deepest selves. And it is a classicist position: our emotions are so complex they are beyond us and below us.’

As with any such attempt to distil an overriding theme from a wide-ranging body of poetry, Raine has to work hard at times to make it fit. Much of Eliot’s early poetry deals, as Raine acknowledges, with frigidity, but it does not always go further than that. One of Eliot’s best short poems, ‘La Figlia Che Piange’, for instance, deals with the consequences and aesthetics of a failure to act; in that sense, it falls squarely within what Raine calls the Romantic position. The ambiguity in the poem does not involve the nature of the speaker’s emotions, but the story behind the scene. The narrative is missing, and the result is a poem that conjures the mood of a particular emotion, rather than ponder those that are ineffable.

In a letter to a friend, Mary Hutchinson, shortly after Prufrock and Other Observations was published in 1917, Eliot explicitly laid out this theme: ‘I like to feel that a writer is perfectly cool and detached, regarding other peoples’ feelings or his own, like a God who has got beyond them; or a person who has dived very deep and comes up holding firmly some hitherto unseen submarine creature.’ This is a fairly apt description of what Eliot tries to do in much of his early poetry. It is not entirely consistent with Raine’s theme. More importantly, Eliot’s readiness to describe his own intentions is not merely self-serving – by setting up the critical terms on which he wants people to read him – but it seems to contradict Raine’s insistence on the deficiencies of self-awareness.

For the most part, Raine’s reference points in reading Eliot are other pieces of literature, to the exclusion of Eliot’s much-covered life and times. This is a typical problem with overly close reading: it risks taking the life out of the poems. The problem worsens when Raine turns, in an essay-length appendix, to the issue of Eliot’s anti-Semitism. Raine has long held himself as a defender against the various critics who have attacked Eliot on this front, including Christopher Ricks, Anthony Julius, James Fenton, and Tom Paulin.

Given the evidence, this is a difficult job. In After Strange Gods, a volume of lectures given in 1933 and which Eliot later withdrew from publication, Eliot famously wrote that ‘race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable’. Even Eliot’s defenders, such as James Wood, have described the claim as ‘indefensible’. Not Raine. In a reading so close it verges on parody, Raine explains that the canny reader will read on to Eliot’s subsequent claim that ‘a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated’ (my italics) and realise that Eliot is advocating ‘a degree of tolerance’ (Raine’s words and italics). According to Raine, Eliot is pleading for tolerance but is conceding the impossibility of unbridled tolerance: like a modern immigration official, says Raine, Eliot would allow some Jews in his ideal society, but not an unlimited amount.

This reading, unlike most of Raine’s book, is patently ridiculous. But it betrays a wider tendency that limits the book and makes much of it dull. By glorifying the subject, the close-reading critic misses the banalities and mundanities – the stock trading, the last-minute edits, the prejudices – that make literary figures and their literature real, complex and flawed, and frequently more interesting. Raine is a good enough close reader and a good enough prose writer to produce some insightful, nicely delivered analysis. But his book does little to add to an understanding of Eliot’s life or legacy.