He is very clear in the letter that he did love her before he left for England. What he's saying is that he was naive about matters of love and continued to idealize her even as he outgrew those feelings. Eventually his "love" was nothing more than the memory of having loved her once. As an older and wiser man he realized marrying her would have meant living the prosaic life of a professor, never excelling at anything, which was most important to him.
DankBlunderwood t1_j6kik7w wrote
Reply to comment by chuckletits in The letters of T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale that were kept sealed from 1956 to 2020 have been released for free online by RunDNA
He is very clear in the letter that he did love her before he left for England. What he's saying is that he was naive about matters of love and continued to idealize her even as he outgrew those feelings. Eventually his "love" was nothing more than the memory of having loved her once. As an older and wiser man he realized marrying her would have meant living the prosaic life of a professor, never excelling at anything, which was most important to him.