The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem

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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. 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. These tensions, as he shows, were mostly played out in literary quarterlies whose circulation was almost exclusively friends and rivals. Towards the end of Pound’s life, Hollis records, he told his daughter: “I should have listened to the Possum”, his nickname for Eliot. At the beginning of that year, in which Eliot turned 33, he was still describing himself in a prospectus as “Banker, critic, poet”.

It is also clear that Eliot’s occasional drift into anti Semitic passages are ugly and reprehensible. 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.

While well-written and generally interesting ( as, indeed, any decent book covering this fascinating period in English literature is bound to be ), potential readers must be advised that this is certainly not 'A Biography of a Poem' ( I suspect 'publisher-ese' there! 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.

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. Three years after the poet’s death, here were the living pages that made his reputation – mixing memory and desire – in the notes and annotations of the poet, his friend Ezra Pound and his first wife, Vivien. This is based on the new trove of 1,131 letters that Eliot sent to Emily Hale, the drama teacher he fell in love with while at Harvard in 1912, who became his confidante and lover again in the 1930s.

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. Vivien has been lying in the most dreadful agony with neuritis in every nerve, increasingly – arms, hands, legs, feet, back. 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. 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. Before his shameful seduction by fascism, Pound was clearly among the most selfless egomaniacs going.