Manuscript of T. S. Eliot's "Personality and Demonic Possession," 1934

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Courtesy of the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia

In May 1933, Eliot delivered three lectures at the University of Virginia as part of the Page-Barbour Series. The lectures, gathered in Spring 1934 as the volume After Strange Gods, gained notoriety because they contain some of the strongest evidence of Eliot’s anti-Semitism. Not long after World War II, Eliot withdrew the book from publication, and it has remained unavailable ever since. The least incendiary of the three lectures, “Personality and Demonic Possession” appeared as an essay in VQR in January 1934. The essay was also reprinted in VQR’s seventy-fifth-anniversary essay anthology, We Write for Our Own Time, edited by Alexander Burnham.