For the whole of his life Medcalf planned to write a book on T. S. Eliot, the poet who meant more to him than any other. He wrote (and published) sections of it, he gave it a title (An Anatomy of Consciousness: A Study of the Work of T. S. Eliot as a Single Poem) but the book was never finished, and many of his friends knew it never would be. This was not because of writer’s block, for he wrote and published a good deal during his life, though he never completed a big book. Instead, he was hampered by a kind of reverence: Eliot for him was not to be regarded as a step on the way to preferment, but as part of his life: he could be moved to tears by a single line of Ash Wednesday that to someone else might seem almost commonplace. What need for a critical book when the poems were already there?
He was a regular contributor to the TLS and to symposiums for leading university presses, and a frequent speaker at conferences and for the British Council, yet one suspects that the single piece of writing for which he would most like to be remembered was an article he wrote about the extraordinary experience of finding a baby. more
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