The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

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S. Eliot’s enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious.

Entrusted with the gift by Pound but forbidden from knowing its contents, Eliot, alongside his fellow traveller Wyndham Lewis, ceremoniously presented the package as the trio assembled at a Left Bank hotel and waited as Joyce struggled with its strings until, for want of a knife, a pair of nail scissors was found. Well written summery of Eliot’s background plus a technical, poetical explanation of the Waste Land; also incorporating the major literary figures in Elliot’s circle like Ezra Pound etc. Like the 434-line poem, this book immerses the reader in the political, social and cultural themes of the day . As Pound remarked to a friend prior to its publication: “Eliot’s Waste Land is I think justification of the ‘movement’ of our modern experiment since 1900.He tells the story of the cultural and personal trauma that forged the poem through the interleaved lives of its protagonists – of Ezra Pound, who edited it, of Vivien Eliot, who endured it, and of T. What it is, essentially, is a narrative of the autobiographical elements that Eliot would pen and Pound edit into the great poem. Instead, they found an old and enfeebled culture that Eliot would famously describe in his poem The Waste Land. The agony forced some genuine poetry out of me, certainly, which I would never have written if I had been happy: in that respect, perhaps, I may be said to have had the life I needed. At the beginning of that year, in which Eliot turned 33, he was still describing himself in a prospectus as “Banker, critic, poet”.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.In his “London Letter”, written for the American review The Dial in July 1921, Eliot noted: “The vacant term of wit set in early this year with a fine hot rainless spring. Even while his own work was being trashed in the press – the Observer’s view of the first publication of The Cantos was that “Mr Pound is not, never has been and never will be a poet” – Pound was indefatigably concerned with both the health and wealth of Eliot, desperate to create a space in which his friend might escape from his office life at Lloyds Bank and devote himself to writing. True understanding of the poem, in my opinion, can only really come from what the reader takes from it. It’s odd that someone so essentially an American who remained one should put on the mantle of an Englishman.

Out of that dryness, out of his own desiccation, Eliot made progress on the poem that he’d had in mind for many months. It has seen the second volume of Robert Crawford’s beautifully weighted biography of the poet ( Eliot After the Waste Land) and also, this month, the publication of Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl.Such is the energy and engagement of Hollis in this task that you find yourself rooting for the emergence of the poem along with Eliot and his supporters, willing it into life as the book progresses. Hollis sketches deftly the expatriate anxieties of the pair as they endeavour to make tradition new, navigating on the one hand the English elitism of the Woolfs and Bertrand Russell – who betrayed Eliot’s friendship in a brief, cruel affair with Vivien – and on the other American avant garde rivalries with the likes of William Carlos Williams.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. This richly analytical book locates the poem's genesis in the aftermath of the first world war and the "nightmare agony" of Eliot's disastrous marriage. With classics such as Ted Hughes's The Iron Man and award-winners including Emma Carroll's Letters from the Lighthouse, Faber Children's Books brings you the best in picture books, young reads and classics. When Eliot included a fragment of that marital neurosis in The Waste Land – “My nerves are bad tonight.Partly, crucially, that is the result of the extraordinary find in 1968 of all the drafts of Eliot’s poem in the Berg Collection of papers at the New York Public Library. He reports the antisemitism that disfigured Eliot’s and Pound’s work, without minimising or mitigating it, as they did, and he is alive to the egotism that also resulted in professional missteps and personal cruelties.