The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

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Instead, they found an old and enfeebled culture that Eliot would famously describe in his poem The Waste Land. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding literary legacy they would leave behind.

Matthew Hollis is the author of Ground Water, shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry. For those who can’t stand Eliot and view him and Pound as two pompous aesthetes better off forgotten…you may want to choose another work.

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. But Matthew Hollis does a fantastic job of shining a spotlight on how much of Eliot's emotion and personal crisis he laid on paper to give us what we still read and love 100 years later.

Before his shameful seduction by fascism, Pound was clearly among the most selfless egomaniacs going. The publication of the facsimile of those drafts, the holy grail for a generation of English literature students, painstakingly edited and collated by Eliot’s second wife, Valerie, gave the poem a second coming in time for the 50th anniversary of its genesis. Those familiar with both the city and the poem know “The Wasteland” was also conceived there—in fact underwent much of its gestation under the city’s influence. One of the numerous illuminating anecdotes of their entwined lives sees TS Eliot deliver a parcel to James Joyce in Paris at their first ever meeting.S. Eliot’s enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. The drought of early summer had not given up – every day in the first week of October, Hollis notes, was unseasonably hot; “the desert year”, as it came to be known. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.