The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

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But it was not, as Matthew Hollis’s captivatingly exhaustive “biography of a poem” demonstrates, a work conceived or executed in isolation; and chief among Eliot’s enablers were his wife, Vivien, and his fellow poet and indefatigable literary fixer, Ezra Pound, who looms almost as large in the book as does Eliot himself. S. Eliot’s enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. 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.

By Remembrance Day 1921, the first in which red poppies were sold on the pier, Eliot was sensing his poem finding its proper form, despite his ongoing despair: “On Margate Sands/ I can connect/ Nothing with nothing,” he wrote. Meticulously grounding his account in time and place and paying close attention to the interplay of poetic intuition and critical mind, Hollis succeeds in gripping our attention. 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.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. By the end of Hollis’s narrative, Joyce has published Ulysses, Eliot The Waste Land, and Pound has quit England, well on his way to an exile that would include his arrest by Allied forces for broadcasting from fascist Italy and incarceration in a hospital for the criminally insane. 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. 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.

Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. The first half, much like the poem, is a patchwork, fragments, of Eliot's (and to an almost equal degree, Ezra Pound's) personal and cultural experiences that would ultimately contribute to what would become, to my mind, the greatest poem ever written. Despite such excursions, the “agony” of the Eliots’ marriage increasingly expressed itself in their nerve endings.When Eliot included a fragment of that marital neurosis in The Waste Land – “My nerves are bad tonight. In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life. So you learn about all of the marital strain and health concerns of Eliot’s wife Vivien, Eliot’s own mental troubles and Pound’s sense that modern capitalism was ruining society and his turn to a nutty, yet still dangerous, embrace of Fascism.

The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding literary legacy they would leave behind. 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. The Waste Land lends itself so well to this kind of social narrative because it was almost a collective project.He reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists — Ezra Pound, who edited it; Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and T. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. I have poured over its meaning and consulted most of its references in an effort to understand it more and more. And “a new form of influenza has been discovered, which leaves extreme dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth”.

Two: this extensive and wide ranging book, could easily, by Mr Hollis, have been twice as long, and never once been boring. He charts Eliot’s peculiar upbringing in St Louis, Missouri, his conflicted relationship with his mother and the horror that was his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood, who lived almost the last decade of her life in a psychiatric hospital. He sifts and rakes over the dead ground of the poet’s broken relationship with his American parents, his disastrous infertile marriage, and the no man’s land of London decimated by Spanish flu after the great war. Examines, with amazing forensic diligence, the context and fraught composition of the most famous poem of the 20th century.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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It is also clear that Eliot’s occasional drift into anti Semitic passages are ugly and reprehensible. Beyond that, as you would expect in a book by a professional poet, the writing alone makes it enjoyable . By the autumn, after a disastrous visit by his mother, Eliot has taken refuge in the Albemarle hotel in Margate to recuperate from a breakdown.