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Eliot After "The Waste Land"
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About This Book
Young Eliot: From St. Louis to "The Waste Land" was hailed as "exceptional" and "assiduous" ( The New York Times ). Robert Crawford's meticulous, incisive scholarship continues in Eliot After "The Waste Land" , an invaluable record of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet, and troubled man. After being kept from the public for more than fifty years, the letters between T. S. Eliot and his longtime love and muse Emily Hale were unsealed in 2020. Drawing on these intimate exchanges and on countless interviews and archives, as well as on Eliot's own poetry and prose, the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford completes the narrative he began in Young Eliot . Eliot After "The Waste Land" , the long-awaited second volume of Crawford's magisterial, meticulous portrait of the twentieth century's most significant poet, tells the story of the mature Eliot during his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, including his complex interior life. Chronicling Eliot's time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford shows us the public and personal experiences that helped inspire Eliot's later masterpieces. Crawford describes the poet's conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and his happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his Nobel Prize, his great work Four Quartets , and his adventures in the theater. Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human as husband, lover, and widower; as banker, editor, playwright, and publisher; and most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art amid personal disasters.
Reviews
"The Nobel-winning poet and playwright Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) claws his way out of modernist despondency in this revelatory biography from Crawford...The author surveys the American-born Eliot's life in London after the 1922 publication of The Waste Land, sharply dissecting the tensions between the public acclaim he received and his private turmoil and angst, with his political conservatism (and antisemitism), and in the moral certitudes of the Anglican Church, which he embraced in a religious turn that baffled other modernist literati...Braiding piquant detail with rich analysis ('In his life, he worried about his hernia; in his poetry, he turned again to structuring an account of modern existence on an ancient fertility ritual..."
"Drawing on revelatory new material, Crawford provides a lively, illuminating narrative of the poet's long second act ..."
"Crawford's concentration on Eliot's private life results in a partial picture, one that shifts the poet's intellectual and artistic accomplishments to the background."
"Crawford surveys Eliot's life after the publication of The Waste Land (1922), he wisely doesn't aim at new 'readings' of Eliot's poems, although he is careful not to neglect any one of them ..."
"celebration in Chichester after his return from a short Spanish holiday' and 'unveiling a plaque to Yeats'...One of the most painful elements of Crawford's book concerns Eliot's 'sense of humour,' which (in so far as it existed) suffered the twin deficiencies of being ponderous and racist...Eliot's elephantine frivolities constituted a doomed attempt to escape his own seriousness, but also the tragedy of his personal life...He suffered 'a maddening feeling of failure and inferiority'...Crawford's criticism of Eliot's poetry is characterised by a brevity that might have enlivened his narration of the dinners and speaking engagements...One's eventual sense of Eliot is, I suppose, of a man not at home in the world...Like many poets, he was doomed to feel more intensely than other people, but Eliot's feelings — his mystical longings and civilisational anguishes — were especially difficult to contain in a human mind and especially prone to alienate him from other inhabitants of the 20th century."
"This wise decision to allow Eliot's self-justifications to occupy significant space in the book, and to be self-convicting, serves the story best."
"After completing a two-volume biography, Crawford continues his meticulous, perceptive examination of the life and work of T.S."
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