The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

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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. 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. And “a new form of influenza has been discovered, which leaves extreme dryness and a bitter taste in the mouth”. As someone who has read The Waste Land but did not know its autobiographical extent, I found it well worth the read. Before his shameful seduction by fascism, Pound was clearly among the most selfless egomaniacs going.

Like the 434-line poem, this book immerses the reader in the political, social and cultural themes of the day . 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.

There is much else beside close textual reading in this impressive examination of artistic creation. True understanding of the poem, in my opinion, can only really come from what the reader takes from it.Towards the end of Pound’s life, Hollis records, he told his daughter: “I should have listened to the Possum”, his nickname for Eliot. TS Eliot spent six days a week at the offices of Lloyds bank and crammed the business of poetry and literary criticism into the evenings and Sundays. 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. 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. 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 result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding literary legacy they would leave behind.

Rather than any attempt at the 'life' of Eliot's masterpiece, it is rather the documentation of the contextual milieu out of which 'The Waste Land' arose.

Examines, with amazing forensic diligence, the context and fraught composition of the most famous poem of the 20th century. 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. What it is, essentially, is a narrative of the autobiographical elements that Eliot would pen and Pound edit into the great poem. 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.The evolution of those pages – Pound striking out the whole first section, Vivien’s remarks on English idioms – have become folkloric among Eliot’s readers, but still Hollis invests them with fresh life. 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.