The Antiphon The University of Maryland. In 1954, once Barnes had completed writing the play, she sent it to T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber, who had previously published "Nightwood" and with whom she had developed a strong friendship. Eliot was initially very uncertain of the play's merits, indeed in a letter responding to it he explained that he had struggled to fully comprehend it. Nonetheless, he enlisted the poet and critic Edwin Muir to read the manuscript, who claimed the play "a work of genius and utterly absurd." Muir did, however, suggest some editorial changes, especially to the first act,
T. S. Eliot to a lunatic asylum, against her will, where she remained until her death of heart disease in 1947. Their relationship became the subject of a 1984 play "Tom & Viv", which in 1994 was adapted as a film of the same name. In a private paper written in his sixties, Eliot confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of [Ezra] Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in