For some years we had no full, formal biography of T. S. Eliot, and this seemed, to many people, at the very least odd. For - as those many people viewed it - Eliot was, after all, the dominant figure in English letters for a good part of the twentieth century, and a biography, like being interred in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, would constitute mere public acknowledgment of such status in the literary world. The reason why there was no Life of T. S. Eliot for a considerable time is well known to literary scholars though, I think, imperfectly understood by them, their explanation going something like this: acting on motives that all potential biographers and indeed everyone in the scholarly world seemed to feel free to question, Eliot declared that he wanted no Life written, and he inserted a clause to this effect into his will; and those responsible for his estate (primarily his widow, acting as executor of his will) successfully prevented a biography by making access to the materials necessary for writing a Life difficult if not impossible. When I say that this explanation though well known has been imperfectly understood I mean first that, as an explanation, it seems to me a little too easy and too simple in the case of someone of Eliot's generally acknowledged subtlety and complexity, and second that critics, having accepted this suspiciously easy answer, have then either ignored or misconstrued the principled objection that Eliot held to being the subject - perhaps one might better say the object - of biographical treatment.