“I am worn out. I cannot go on,” he lamented a little histrionically as early as March 1923, but he still had a long way to go on. February 1925 found him “at the blackest moment of my life”, but in reality there were blacker moments still to come. “So life is simply from minute to minute of horror,” he wrote to Virginia Woolf the following month, perhaps hearing a draft line of poetry forming itself somewhere in his mind. But, as far as we can tell from these letters, during these years not many lines of poetry were forming in the mind of the figure who was arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.

Stefan Collini on The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Vol 2 | Books | The Guardian