IT must rate as the literary snub of the 20th century. T S Eliot, one of Britain’s greatest poets, rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm for publication on the grounds of its unconvincing Trotskyite politics.

Eliot, a former director of Faber and Faber, the publisher, wrote his rejection in a highly critical letter in 1944, one of many private papers made available for the first time by his widow Valerie for a BBC documentary.

When Orwell submitted his novel, an allegory on Stalin’s dictatorship, Eliot praised its “good writing” and “fundamental integrity”.

However, the book’s politics, at a time when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler, were another matter.

“We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,” wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing”.

Eliot wrote: “After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

“It’s a fascinating, yet very odd letter,” said Anthony Wall, series editor of Arena, the BBC arts documentary, which will explore the papers. “What exactly does Eliot mean?”

Animal Farm was published the following year by Secker & Warburg.

Other items released by Valerie, 82, cast light on Eliot’s politics. The documents include a previously unpublished theatre review written for Valerie in 1961 after the couple had seen Beyond the Fringe, the satirical review.

“It is a mixture of brilliance, juvenility and bad taste,” Eliot concluded. “Absence of any satire at the expense of the Labour party – although it is pleasant to see this type of entertainment being so successful.”

The poet and playwright married Valerie Fletcher, his secretary at Faber, in 1957 after an unhappy first marriage. He was 38 years older than his new wife. They regularly went to the theatre and, after arriving home, he often wrote short reviews on the programme, which he would give to Valerie.

Until now she has kept almost all of the Eliot archive private. The BBC will show some of the Arena programme at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Friday.

The memorabilia counters the common perception that he was buttoned-up and cold - an image suggested by his alleged ill-treatment of his first wife Vivienne.

Other Eliot reviews include one of a performance by a young Vanessa Redgrave in The Lady From the Sea in 1960. He described the actress as “someone to watch. Good in a very difficult part”.

Several interviewees in the documentary, to be shown on BBC2 in early summer, comment on the positive effect that Valerie had on Eliot. Rosemary Goad, a former Faber employee, said: “He returned from honeymoon very skittish.”

Eliot, author of The Waste Land and Murder in the Cathedral, died in 1965.

Valerie has also released a poem written by Eliot in 1938 and so far published only in Family News, a magazine run by the Morley family. Frank Morley also worked at Faber. Susanna, Morley’s daughter and Eliot’s goddaughter, was one of four children to whom Eliot dedicated Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats.

The poem, Cows, begins: “Of all the beasts which God allows / In England’s green and pleasant land / I most of all dislike the cows: / Their ways I do not understand.”

Susanna tells the BBC that Eliot “ played cricket with me and my brothers”. Her family nicknamed his nearby home in Kent “Uncle Tom’s cabin”.

“Because Eliot’s poetry is regarded as oblique and he has this tweed-suit image, people think of the man being inward-looking and not sociable,” said Wall. “But what comes over from the archive is a very different person, especially in his later years with Valerie.”

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