Poets by the pound

Ezra Pound introduced his friends Tom Eliot and Willie Yeats, and wanted them to like each other, but initially "they didn't take to each other terribly well. Eliot complained all he talked about was George Moore and spooks". T. S. Eliot's widow, Mrs Valerie Eliot, was describing the relationship between the three poets as she officially opened the Yeats Summer School in Sligo yesterday.

A youthful, energetic woman with a sharp wit, she is far from being the passive relict of a literary icon. She is the editor of his collected letters and has published a facsimile of "The Waste Land".

She first met Eliot in 1949, when she came to work as his secretary. But she was already an admirer of his work, having heard a recording of him reading "The Journey of the Magi" while still at school. She married him 10 years after they met, following the death of his first wife.

Despite the inauspicious beginning of their relationship, Yeats and Eliot got on better, and each greatly admired the other's work, she said. "Pound wanted them to be friends." After her husband's death the manuscript of "The Waste Land", which had been heavily annotated by Pound, turned up in New York Public Library. She went there to work on it, and, despite many years in exile from his native country, Pound arrived - without a passport - to help her.

"I had laid it out for him to look at it. He sat looking at it and wept," she told the students, clearly moved herself by the memory. The next time they met was at a memorial service for Eliot, and she then put him on the plane for Dublin to visit Mrs Yeats.

Without Mrs Eliot there would be no collection of Eliot's letters. "When I married him he had two bans: no biographies, no letters," she told The Irish Times. "I worked on that. I said `Remember that letter you sent to Stephen Spender', and reminded him of other letters. He never kept copies of his letters. Eventually he burst out laughing and said, `All right, but you'll have to edit them'. "

So what about a biography? "If I do the letters at least I've cleared the way, haven't I?" T. S. Eliot died 22 years ago, and she began collecting the letters after he died. This has involved buying some of them on the open market. "I haven't seen my dining room table for years," she said.

A typical story is of finding a letter to her husband during the war suggesting he leave the country, because English literature could not afford to lose him. She had no idea what he wrote back. Then the reply came up on the open market. It said, "this is my country now. I won't leave it." Happy to proclaim herself a Tory, Mrs Eliot is proud of her husband's patriotism. "I'd have liked to send copies to Stephen Spender, Auden and Ben Britten," she said.

Apart from the difficulty of locating letters, and sometimes having to buy them, her work faces less obvious hazards. "My neighbours upstairs are always leaving on the shower, and the water comes through the ceiling. I have to run around with buckets to stop it falling on them."

Professor John Kelly from St John's College, Oxford, will speak on the subject of Yeats and Eliot tomorrow. The president of the Yeats Society, Mrs Maura McTighe, in her address, paid tribute to the late Mary Lappin, a founding member of the society, who died recently . "She did more than anyone else to promote the school for 37 years," she said.

Other lectures this week include Professor Roy Foster, of Hertford College, Oxford, on "Yeats, Theatre and Revolution" and Professor Seamus Deane of the University of Notre Dame, on "Yeats: Family and Familiar Values".

One of the highlights of this year's summer school will be a showing of the only known video of Yeats. A visitor to the southern Spanish town of Algeciras made an early home movie when the poet was visiting it: Professor Ann Saddlemyer who found it and made it into a video will now show it in Sligo.

Next week will see lectures by Professor Nicholas Grene of Trinity College on "Yeats and Dates": Professor Mitsuko Ohno from the Aichi Shukutoku University in Japan on "Yeats and Film" and Professor Jon Stallworthy of Wolfson College, Oxford on "Yeats's Last Poems" .

Tonight there will be a joint poetry reading and recital from Seamus Heaney and traditional piper Liam O'Flynn, while on Friday Eavan Boland will read her poems, followed by a poetry workshop over the weekend. Michael Longley and Medbh McGuckian will also give poetry readings during the summer school.