The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

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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.

It is a typical and strangely sad instance of where Pound’s scattergun energy would lead – as his own writing faltered, and was increasingly met with indifference or outright derision, his gargantuan efforts on others’ behalf remained undiluted, even when misguided. 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.Vivien has been lying in the most dreadful agony with neuritis in every nerve, increasingly – arms, hands, legs, feet, back. 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. Beyond that, as you would expect in a book by a professional poet, the writing alone makes it enjoyable .

This year’s centenary has been marked with a series of readings and events in the UK, the US and across the world. At times he has you looking over Eliot’s shoulder, in Margate and in a subsequent mental health clinic in Lausanne, as the words progress slowly on the white pages. 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. 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. 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.The Waste Land lends itself so well to this kind of social narrative because it was almost a collective project. 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. Like the 434-line poem, this book immerses the reader in the political, social and cultural themes of the day . 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 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. Matthew Hollis is the author of Ground Water , short listed for the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, the Guardian First Book Award and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. 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.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. It's a testament to his own talent at dissecting his subject matter and infusing it with imaginative empathy that the reader comes away from his "biography" ready to look at The Waste Land with fresh eyes. Within, a clearly second-hand pair of brown shoes, prompted by Pound’s anxiety that Joyce, whom he liked and admired, was short of funds and in need of sturdy footwear. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. As someone who has read The Waste Land but did not know its autobiographical extent, I found it well worth the read.