The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

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Despite such excursions, the “agony” of the Eliots’ marriage increasingly expressed itself in their nerve endings. Even if you flinch at the idea of a poem demanding a biography, an exception has to be made for The Waste Land. Out of that dryness, out of his own desiccation, Eliot made progress on the poem that he’d had in mind for many months. In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life. 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.

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. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Two: this extensive and wide ranging book, could easily, by Mr Hollis, have been twice as long, and never once been boring.

Matthew Hollis’s new book is not another literary study of The Waste Land nor is it merely a biography of Eliot and Pound. From Nobel Laureates Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter to theatre greats Tom Stoppard and Alan Bennett to rising stars Polly Stenham and Florian Zeller, Faber Drama presents the very best theatre has to offer.At the beginning of that year, in which Eliot turned 33, he was still describing himself in a prospectus as “Banker, critic, poet”. 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. 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.

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. There is much else beside close textual reading in this impressive examination of artistic creation. 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.

Partly, crucially, that is the result of the extraordinary find in 1968 of all the drafts of Eliot’s poem in the Berg Collection of papers at the New York Public Library. 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. 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.