Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot and Irene Fassett. Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot (28 May 1888 – 22 January 1947) was the first wife of American poet T. S. Eliot, whom she wed in 1915, while he was studying at Oxford. They were never compatible; he seems to have been seeking a pretext to stay in England, in defiance of his family, by marrying an English bride. Haigh-Wood had always suffered from serious health problems, compounded by insecurity about her social class. It is clear that her disastrous marriage worsened her condition. Eliot would not consider divorce, but formally separated from her in 1933.
T. S. Eliot us home all point to the pilgrim's path along the road of sanctification. With the important exception of "Four Quartets", Eliot directed much of his creative energies after "Ash Wednesday" to writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and admirer of Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama; witness his allusions to Webster, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare and Thomas Kyd in "The Waste Land". In a 1933 lecture he said "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility . . . . He