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Two typed letters, signed, and one secretarial letter, to the poet and broadcaster D. G. Bridson, on Faber and Faber headed paper,

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In 1937 Geoffrey Bridson had mounted a radio production, with Eliot’s blessing, of The Waste Land – it ‘made quite remarkable radio, but I have to confess that Eliot did not share my own enthusiasm for the result’ (Prospero and Ariel), particularly after cuts were made to the recording. Nevertheless Eliot had a high regard for Bridson’s own writing (he had published the latter’s Prometheus in The Criterion in 1935 and, later noted. ‘You seem to be the only man in England who knows how to write dramatic script for the microphone’, letter 5 July 1940); they also collaborated on further programmes in the 1950s, though Bridson was quite critical of some of Eliot’s later work.

Here, on 19 February, 1952, Eliot writes ‘to thank you for sending me The Christmas Child’ (Bridson’s collection of poems ‘for reading aloud’), ‘and for your inscription in it. I am delighted that so much of your work for the BBC has been given the permanent form that it deserves, and I am very happy to have the book’. Later that year Bridson recorded a piece by Eliot for Wyndham Lewis’s The Human Age. Eliot’s note of 27 April 1955 is to return a copy of Bridson’s dramatic poem The Quest of Gilgamesh (broadcast 1954, but not published until 1972) – ‘Personally, I part with it with regret’; and in 1957, Susan McEwen, Eliot’s secretary, writes to send a copy of The Criterion for April 1935, the issue in which Bridson’s Prometheus had appeared – it was ‘rather old and dirty … but is the only one we have’.

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